Organ Recitals as Worthy as Concerts

Preconcert recitals are hardly anything new — the Mostly Mozart Festival has been offering them for decades — and lots of people skip them. But as the economy tightens, they can seem a welcome bonus, a significant expansion of what you get for the price of a ticket. Sacred Music in a Sacred Space, Kent Tritle’s choral series at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, offers organ recitals as preludes to the formal programs. The church’s Mander organ, completed with considerable fanfare in 1993, is a magnificent instrument, and the preconcert recitals often include works that aren’t heard much otherwise.

On Wednesday, just before Mr. Tritle led a program of mostly 20th-century works (to be reviewed in the Friday paper), Renée Anne Louprette, the church’s associate music director, played a program that nestled Ligeti’s 1953 “Ricercare per Organo (Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi)” among more familiar scores by Reger, Frescobaldi and Duruflé.

Her thoughtful, rich-hued performance prefigured Mr. Tritle’s program, partly because he also presented Ligeti (“Lux Aeterna,” composed 13 years and a major style change later), but mainly because both programs were built on the links between the antique and the modern. In the Ligeti, that link is explicit: the composer had Frescobaldi in mind, and Ms. Louprette helpfully played the “Recercar Cromatico, Post il Credo” from Frescobaldi’s “Fiori Musicali” just before it. Ligeti pushed Frescobaldi’s adventurous chromaticism forward, to the point where it flirted with serialism. The contrast with the works surrounding it was striking — but not as striking as the contrast between this thorny piece and Ligeti’s eerie tone-cluster work in Mr. Tritle’s program.

Ms. Louprette made a brief appearance in the main program as well, playing the gently chordal piano line near the end of Gavin Bryars’s “On Photography.” But the one big organ moment in the mostly a cappella choral concert — the explosive postlude to Arvo Pärt’s “Beatitudes” — was played by Nancianne Parella, the church’s associate organist.