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58 BACH / ISOIR_TRANSCRIPTIONS
So, a few years later, after I finished my course in Toulouse, I went to see André
at Auch Cathedral where he was giving a recital with the violinist Gérard Poulet. I
had made an appointment with him and I played a few pieces for him. ‘What can I
teach you after Xavier Darasse?’ he asked me. I was only nineteen at the time and
there was still so much I had to learn, but my organ studies were officially over.
However, André took me with him for a year at the Orsay Conservatoire. Xavier
Darasse, as a great musician and teacher, had made me study a major part of the
organ repertoire in depth, yet it had flown by so fast. André Isoir, without radically
changing my playing style, allowed me to ‘let the dust settle’, to step back, to let
the instruments sound freely (and to take an interest in how they were built), to
loosen up the academic and educational ‘corset’, and so on – all that in just one
year of pure bliss under his direction. Still, with my first concerts coming in, was I
sufficiently equipped to begin an organist’s career at the age of twenty? I decided
to stay a little longer in his improvisation class, still at the Orsay Conservatoire. It
was like a true family there; no rivalry among us, no tension whatsoever – we were
a bunch of friends, brothers and sisters. The improvisation course took place once
a week at Auteuil Reformed Church (where Mrs Isoir played the organ), in the 16th
arrondissement of Paris. We went there to exercise our ear, harmonise Gregorian
chant, chorales or Duke Ellington pieces, mess up our fugue strettos (especially
me!), improvise great symphonic interludes, share our joys and petty woes, get our
car fixed (by the master himself) for those who had one, or ask for some DIY or
plumbing advice (again from the master). Most of all we loved André’s scathing,
spot-on sense of humour.