This is a sort of self-portrait of the Great Organ of the Royal Chapel of Versailles, delivering all its aspects, enhanced by the choice of a repertoire emblematic of the baroque era: the major classic French organ works (Couperin, Marchand, de Grigny, Corrette) composed to glorify the very specific aesthetics of instruments like that of Louis XIV's Chapel; but also to reveal its other sound riches, transcriptions of chefs d'oeuvres, from Le Sommeil d'Atys by Lully, to the contredanses of Rameau's Boréades. To add a new dimension to the organ's sound universe and to enhance its orchestral qualities, modern editing and "re-recording" processes were gently used to serve the superposition of musical voices, as if invisible hands filled in for the organist in certain works, which are true Proust's "madeleines" for Gaétan Jarry. He goes all out to play the instrument of Versailles "for the Glory of God and the King"!

La musique d’Orgue de Nicolas de Grigny constitue un sommet dans la musique pour clavier de la fin du XVIIe siècle. Le texte musical du présent enregistrement est fondé sur la première édition de 1699. Les conventions de l’époque, telles que nous les avons comprises grâce aux recherches des musicologues, ont été prises en considération, notamment en ce qui concerne la pratique de la musica ficta des altérations rétroactives. On mentionne toujours l’influence de de Grigny sur le jeune Bach. L’anecdote de la copie de Bach est bien connue.

Though he lived to be only 31, Nicolas de Grigny is remembered more than any of his contemporaries as epitomizing the French classical organ tradition. Technically and in his creative ideas Grigny demanded much more of his instrument (and his poor team of blowers!) than any of his predecessors, a fact that makes his works stylistically more akin to harpsichord than to organ practice at the time. In 1703, the year of his death, his wife published a first edition of his complete solo organ works, Premier Livre d’orgue (organists at the time typically composed only one or two books, then spent the rest of their lives improvising on them). A copy of this less-than-100-page volume eventually found its way to Germany and impressed a certain J.S. Bach enough that he reproduced it by hand for his own study.