PRESS
Reviews
Passions Alight in Sacred Season: Bach Passions in Performance for Holy Week, by JAMES R. OESTREICH, The New York Times, April 4, 2012
...a magnificent performance of Bach’s “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue (BWV 552) by the Trinity organist, Renée Anne Louprette, on the chapel’s wonderful Schlicker organ.
Renée Anne Louprette (organ), Michael Dervan, The Irish Times, July 28, 2009
St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire
Buxtehude – Praeludium in D minor BuxWV140. Böhm – Vater unser im Himmelreich. Capriccio in D. Frescobaldi – Recercar Cromatico post il Credo. Ligeti – Ricercare. Bach – Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543. Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebot BWV678. Mendelssohn – Sonata in B flat Op 65 No 4.
Renée Anne Louprette, associate director of music at the Church of St Ignatius Loyola in New York, made her début in the organ series at St Michael’s, Dún Laoghaire on Sunday.
She presented herself as a communicative player with no shortage of imaginative ideas, with fingers fully capable of backing them up, and with feet which are not just nimble on the pedals, but every bit as expressively articulate as her fingers. The feet first dazzled at the end of a thrusty performance of Buxtehude’s Praeludium in D minor, BuxWV140. She followed this with a contrasted pair of works by Georg Böhm (1661-1733), and then a pairing that crossed the centuries.
The Recercar Cromatico post il Credo from Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali of 1635 and the 30-year-old György Ligeti’s homage to Frescobaldi, his Ricercare of 1953, are united by their extreme chromaticism and also their fondness for spiralling shapes, which clash in ways that Louprette captured with a sense of energised relish.
Her coupling of two works by Bach offered the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV543, in a performance of impressive sportiness, and the chorale prelude Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebot in a reading of stately calmness that communicated a sense of unutterable richness in the complexity of its counterpoint.
For all its bustle and brio, the fourth of Mendelssohn’s six organ sonatas came as something of an anti-climax after the Bach. On the evidence of this performance, mid 19th-century sweetness would not seem to be as close to Louprette’s heart as the earlier and later music of this impressive recital.
Organ Recitals as Worthy as Concerts, Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, February 12, 2009
3 Soloists Give Voice to a Mighty Instrument, Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, July 4, 2007
The London Organ Day 1998, The Incorporated Association of Organists, IAO News, August 1998
Newly Repaired Hall Reverberates to Fine Piano, Albany Times Union, October 13, 1993
Articles
A Celebration of Bach, as a Counterpoise to Painful Memories" by James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 9/11/11
(article on Trinity Church’s weeklong series of concerts and observances of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, Remember to Love)
In Washington for convention, organists pull out all the stops, Washington Post, July 8, 2010
Americans Love the Organ (in French), Ladepeche.fr, April 15, 2010
Interpreting Bach, The Organ, February-April 2002