Jean-Baptiste Robin: Improvisation on Fairy Tales
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
Jules Massenet: Les Mandores from Cendrillon
Maurice Duruflé: Suite Op. 5
- Prélude
- Sicilienne
- Toccata
Claude Debussy: Clair de lune
Marcel Dupré: Deuxième esquisse Op. 41 No. 2
Frédéric Chopin: Prélude Op. 28 No. 15 (Raindrop Prelude)
Maurice Ravel: Ma Mère l'Oye
Jean-Baptiste Robin: The Hands of Time

Walt Disney devoted his entire life to the creation and dissemination of fairy tales and fantasy meant to trigger the imagination of children, and adults, all over the world. And music was always an important and integral part of his work as in Fantasia for example. His animated films in particular covered everything from baby rabbits to evil creatures. So how befitting it is to play fantastical music on the fantastic Rosales/Glatter-Götz Organ that sits in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a massive instrument with pipes ranging from a 1' Piccolo to a 64' Contre Basson. Organist Jean-Baptiste Robin puts all of these to good use in this recording, including the 64' pedal pipe heard at the end of the Toccata by Maurice Duruflé. Make sure to go around your house after this one to check for cracks in the windows.

Other highlights include the apropos Improvisation on Fairy Tales by Jean-Baptiste Robin himself, based on Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker'. A piece that is very hard to pull off on a pipe organ is Debussy's Clair de lune. You see, on a piano the sustain pedal can be used to hold certain notes while other notes are being played, creating a wonderful harmonic overlap crucial to this piano piece. On the organ there is no such thing so as soon as a note is released it's gone, so it's practically impossible to have a multitude of notes resonate simultaneously. But with a judicious combination of stops, Jean-Baptiste Robin manages to project the right atmosphere. Oddly enough, I never liked the orchestral version of Ma Mère l'Oye by Maurice Ravel, but I admire this organ transcription, and again Robin uses a highly imaginitive registration of stops to generate sounds that make the music come alive. The disc concludes with a powerful work by Jean-Baptiste Robin titled The Hands of Time which fully demonstrates this instrument's expressive range and impressive brawn.