Скачать или смотреть Jehan Alain - Variations sur un thème de Clément Jannequin (Pierre Segond, Saint-Pierre, Geneva)

This piece, one Jehan Alain's earliest, "Variations sur un thème de Clément Jannequin", is actually no such thing. Scholarship since Alain's death has identified the theme as being by a pen other than Jannequin's.

This recording is taken from an old LP - long out of print - recorded by Pierre Segond (to whom the piece is dedicated) at the Reformed Cathedral of Saint Pierre in Geneva on a large Metzler organ of 1965. A particular thank you must go to Segond's arguably most famous pupil, American theatre organist Llewellyn ("Lew") Williams (of the Organ Stop Pizza restaurant, Mesa, Arizona, with its four-manual, 78-rank Wurlitzer), who sent me this fantastic recording.

French organist, composer and war hero Jehan Alain (1911-1940) was among many French fighters evacuated from the Dunkirk beaches alongside the British Expeditionary Forces, whom they had been assisting. These French servicemen were then processed through the former Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum in Wandsworth, South London, which was by then an MI6-run clearing camp called the London Reception Centre. Alain volunteered to return to France: a skilled motorcyclist, he became a dispatch rider in the Eighth Motorised Armour Division of the French Army. On 20 June 1940, he was assigned to reconnoitre the German advance on the eastern side of Saumur, and encountered a group of German soldiers at Le Petit-Puy. Coming around a curve, and hearing the approaching tread of the Germans, he abandoned his motorcycle and engaged the enemy troops with his carbine, killing sixteen of them before being killed himself. He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre for his bravery and was buried by the Germans with full military honours.

My own personal connection with Alain is that I have a magnificent 1917 Bösendorfer grand piano which was, some seventy years after Alain's death, restored (very conservatively) in the very same building through which he was processed in South London. It is a somewhat tenuous connection but one of which I am very proud.