Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast

Welcome to Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast #75! Today's guest is an American organist Dr. Jesse Eschbach who is a world-reknown expert on the French organ culture in general and Aristide Cavaille-Coll's organs in particular. Dr. Eschbach is a graduate of the University of Michigan where he was a student of Robert Glasgow. He completed his formal education during a five-year residency in Paris as a student of Marie-Claire Alain, specializing in early French music inher conservatory class at Rueil-Malmaison where he was awarded both a Prix d’Excellence and a Prix de Virtuosité. As one of the very last students of the legendary Marie-Madeleine Duruflé-Chevalier, he studied the complete organ works of her husband, Maurice Duruflé, as well as much of the French symphonic repertoire. Since 1986, Eschbach has served on the faculty at the University of North Texas as the full-time Professor of Organ, instructing performance majors at all levels. His students have dominated the annual San Antonio competition since 1995 and have won prizes in national competitions as well. A very active performer until 1998, Eschbach has several CDs to his credit, including a disc recorded at the Cathédrale de Perpignan entitled “Music of the Second Empire and Beyond”, released in June, 2003. Also released in 2003 was his 800+ page book, detailing the original stoplists of the majority of organs constructed by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, based extensively on the Lapresté collection. This research is still in progress, and an expanded second edition will be released in the next few years. The first edition received a very positive “feature review” in the March, 2007 issue of The American Organist. Likewise, his CD recorded on the 1857 Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ in Perpignan consisting of works by Lemmens, Franck, Gigout, Fessy, Schubert, and Couturier garnered high praise in a February, 2007 review in The Diapason. Recent tours have taken him to Poland and Italy. He has recently completed assignments adjudicating the preliminary rounds of the AGO National Competition, the Canadian International Organ Competition, and in April 2008, judged the finals of the Fort Wayne National Competition. ​In this conversation we talk about Dr. Eschbach's research on the stop lists of Cavaille-Coll's organs. ​ Enjoy and share your comments below. ​ And don't forget to help spread the word about the SOP Podcast by sharing it with your organist friends. Thanks for caring. Relevant links: https://music.unt.edu/faculty-and-staff/jesse-eschbach Jesse Eschbach: Aristide Cavaille-Coll. A compendium of known stoplists Vol. 1: http://amzn.to/2iowS4t