Dupré: Choral Works – BBC Radio 3

The great French organist Marcel Dupré has been enjoying a boom on CD in the last year, thanks mainly to two complete surveys of his organ works from Naxos and Guild. Guild hasn’t quite finished, though…here’s a disc of Dupré’s choral music, with the Vasari Singers and the organist who’s shown himself to be such a fine interpreter of Dupré’s music, Jeremy Filsell. Parts of the early De Profundis could almost be from the Durufle Requiem.

The first part of the De Profundis by Marcel Dupré, a large-scale setting of Psalm 130 from 1916, dedicated to the soldiers who’d been killed in the war he was unfit to fight in. The Vasari Singers meet all the challenges of this CD head-on, and apart from occasionally wishing for a more authentically French timbre, and more weight in the big moments, I enjoyed the whole thing. Jeremy Filsell is the organist, Jeremy Backhouse conducts. For anyone who likes the Faure and Durufle Requiems, or who’s got into Dupré’s organ music and wants to know what else he wrote…go right ahead. It’s new from Guild, and it matches their complete Dupré organ series, with one of Monet’s atmospheric studies of Rouen Cathedral on the booklet.

BBC Radio 3