RECOMMENDED French organist and composer Marcel Dupré is a name that every organist knows and great organists across the world play his unique music. French composer and mystic Olivier Messiaen, whose centennial is being celebrated this year, was a student, as were many of the great twentieth-century organists of Europe. “Le Chemin de la Croix” (“The Stations of the Cross”) began life as a set of organ improvisations that Dupré gave in Brussels in 1931 in between oral meditations on the Stations of the Cross by French poet and playwright Paul Claudel. Each of Dupré’s improvisations was an ethereal musical response to the preceding words based on each of the fourteen stations and this was such a success that Dupré elaborated upon them and wrote them down. This rare area performance of the complete work, on Good Friday, no less, includes an English translation of all fourteen of the original Chaudel meditations read by Kenneth Northcott followed in sequence by all fourteen of Dupré’s short pieces related to each of the stations. This is a great opportunity to hear the rear gallery organ of Rockefeller’s reinstalled Skinner pipe organ and also to appreciate the evocative mastery of Dupré’s music. (Dennis Polkow) Friday, March 21 at Rockefeller Chapel
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