Earth Shaker

The audience had pushed into every nook of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and several hundred spilled over on to the lawn outside. At 8:30, a kindly-faced man, with the tiny red rosette of the Legion of Honor in the lapel of his grey suit, nudged his way through the chancel, climbed up on the organ bench, stretched his legs, and began Bach's Prelude in C Major. As he wove the huge fabric of the fugue, never losing a single thread of it, his listeners understood why Marcel Dupre is considered one of the greatest living organists.

Dupre spun and thundered six preludes and fugues of Bach--a heavy dose even for the hardiest. But before his program was over, small groups had tiptoed up to the chancel to watch his hands fly over the four manuals (keyboards), and his patent-leather pumps dance over the pedals. Said one watcher: "The guy should have been a ballet dancer."

Marcel Dupre, 62, is one of the few men who has ever claimed to know all of the fat and formidable organ literature of Bach by heart. As a performer of Bach and other early masters, he has his rivals: in famed Bach Scholar Albert Schweitzer and Princeton's Carl Weinrich. But Dupre is also a master of the moderns.

Unlike most of his fellow Bach organists, who are scandalized at the thought of an organ bigger than the one Bach wrote for, Dupre likes an organ with all the "French horns and fluttery tone qualities" that the romantic composers wanted, and enough extra stops for the modern improvisations which are his specialty.

The organ Dupre was playing last week in Chicago suited him to a T. It was a little bigger than the earth-shaking organ at St. Sulpice on Paris' Left Bank, which he has played on & off for the past 42 years and considers the world's best. But Chicago's is still a runt--only four manuals and 126 stops--compared to Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall monster, which has ten manuals and 364 stops, including a bass drum, glockenspiel, Chinese gong, xylophone, a grand piano, harp and two bird whistles.

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