Jean Guillou

Jean Guillou
(b Angers, 18 April 1930). French organist, composer and teacher. He is firmly rooted in the tradition of Dupré, Duruflé and Messiaen, his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire, which he entered in 1945.

A period as organ professor at the Instituto de Alta Cultura in Lisbon was followed by recital tours of Canada, the USA and Europe, during which he consolidated his reputation as a virtuoso. It was while resident in West Berlin that he began to establish himself as a composer. He was appointed organist of St Eustache, Paris, in 1963. As a composer Guillou often uses angular lines and pungent sonorities in an atonal idiom; his style is also characterized by obsessive ostinatos, and complex cross-rhythms demanding acute rhythmic precision on the part of the performer. Many of his organ works reveal his genius as an improviser, and nos.2, 4 and 6 of the Sagas are transcriptions of improvisations (recorded under the title ‘Visions cosmiques’). His imagination often moves in a cinematic manner whereby fleeting images produce powerful juxtapositions of contrasting ideas, and some of his improvisations have proved to be the genesis of film scores. He has transcribed for organ such orchestral scores as Pictures at an Exhibition, dances from Petrushka and major works by Liszt and Rachmaninoff. He is also an avant-garde designer of organs, including those at St Eustache, the Tonhalle at Zürich and the church of Notre-Dame des Neiges, Alpe d’Huez.