Xavier Darasse


Xavier Darasse was a French organist and composer. The festival organizes every 3 years the international Xavier Darasse organ competition in his honor.

Life

Born in Toulouse in a musician family, Darasse was a student of Maurice Duruflé, Rolande Falcinelli, Jean Rivier and Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris. In parallel with his career as a concert organist, he was a professor at the and then at the Conservatoire de Lyon, the organ class being "relocated" to Toulouse. His repertoire extends from early music to contemporary repertoire.
In 1976, after a serious road accident, during which he lost his right arm, he had to put an end to his career as a concert performer. He then devoted himself to teaching the organ, as well as composition, with among other things "Instants éclatés" in 1983 for the Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse.
He was appointed director of the Conservatoire de Paris in 1991.
He died prematurely of cancer in 1992, leaving unfinished an opera adapted from Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray.
Darasse listened to the organ in a new way. He favored the breath, the articulated discourse, and registers and colours.
During his short career, Darasse was one of the most eclectic organists of his generation, sensitive as much to early music, whose mysteries he knew, as to contemporary organ music, of which he was one of the great promoters. He recorded on the organ of the Robert Boisseau organ of the one of the first disks of "contemporary" organ music in the very late 1960s. Very close to Antoine Tisné and Iannis Xenakis, he premiered in Germany and France the only work of the latter for organ: Gmeeoorh.

Compositions for pipe organ