Olivier Messiaen

[7/4]

http://www.oliviermessiaen.org

February 18, 2008

Music Review | St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

Demystifying Messiaen, With a Little Help From the Birds

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT

As the climate for classical music in America adjusts to challenges (like the decline of arts education in public schools) and opportunities (the instantaneous availability of music on the Web), the role of the music director of a major orchestra is changing as well. It's no longer enough to be a comprehensive musician, a strong conductor and a good schmoozer of potential patrons. The music directors who are making differences in their communities and winning new listeners are also good teachers, proselytizers and speakers, in person and, increasingly, in videos.

One of the best talkers about music in the business, and a formidable conductor to boot, is David Robertson, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Robertson brought the orchestra to Carnegie Hall for two programs over the weekend. And at a "Discovery Concert" on Friday night he gave an engaging, informative and unabashedly quirky demonstration of how to demystify a daunting contemporary work for the public.

The work was Messiaen's visionary, boldly complex and sprawling "Turangalila Symphony," a 75-minute score composed from 1946 to 1948, when Messiaen was in his late 30s. A practicing Roman Catholic and a musical modernist, he took a fiercely original approach to creating this idiosyncratic work. Written in 10 unconventionally structured movements, "Turangalila" takes its title from a composite of two Sanskrit words with multiple meanings. The piece is a meditation on joy and creation, on love that leads to death as inevitable transcendence of human life and on nature in both its bucolic and violent manifestations.

In a 40-minute introduction, with the orchestra onstage to play excerpts, Mr. Robertson described this cosmic score as "the best possible free-association canvas," to which listeners can bring their own imagery. But he kept the metaphysics to a minimum, focusing on the musical particulars. He began by having Cynthia Millar demonstrate the alluring resources of the ondes martenot, an exotic electronic instrument used in countless sci-fi film scores. Notes played on its restricted keyboard can be subjected to eerie prolongations and atmospheric transformations.

Explaining Messiaen's fascination with Indonesian gamelan music, Mr. Robertson broke down the chantlike theme that opens the ninth movement, "Turangalila 3," in which the gamelan is evoked by a piano and clattering, delicate percussion, with sundry instruments playing bird calls in the background. To Messiaen, Mr. Robertson said, "birds were truly God's musicians." He gave a detailed explanation of how the rhythmic layout of one fidgety theme in the work is stretched out when it passes from the clarinet to the ondes martenot, then slowed almost to stasis when echoed in the orchestra.

His astute observations were fascinating, and his manner and delivery — brainy, wry, almost goofy with enthusiasm — were charming. Speaking of the movement titled "Joy of the Blood of the Stars," an orchestral tour de force, he told listeners to imagine all the stars in the cosmos getting together for one huge, ecstatic party.

The sublimely contemplative "Garden of Love's Sleep," with its lusciously consonant sustained string chords, he said, evokes an "Eden from which we will never be expelled," adding that as the father of twins who had turned 5 that day, he appreciated more than ever this ultimate music of repose.

After intermission came a complete performance. The pianist Nicolas Hodges gave a dynamic account of the virtuosic solo part, harder to play than most concertos. Under Mr. Robertson the St. Louis musicians played this daunting, multilayered score with technical command, rhapsodic fervor and wondrous colorings.

On Saturday night, in a typically creative program, Mr. Robertson began with Brahms's "Tragic Overture" in a weighty, dark-textured yet transparent account that emphasized the intense work's intricacies and often strange strokes. Next came Berg's profound and wrenchingly beautiful Violin Concerto (1935), in a glowing, fearless and inspired performance by the magnificent German violinist Christian Tetzlaff. Mr. Robertson drew impressively lucid playing of this thick-textured score from the responsive St. Louis musicians.

And talk about strange, after intermission Mr. Robertson conducted Sibelius's last substantial work, the haunting tone poem "Tapiola" (1926). The composer John Adams has cited Sibelius as a significant influence. So it was fitting to end the evening with the New York premiere of Mr. Adams's new "Doctor Atomic" Symphony, a 25-minute, one-movement symphonic score adapted by the composer from his 2005 opera about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, in a glittering and incisive performance.

This is no mere cut-and-paste compendium of orchestra passages from the opera but an adaptation of several extended sections, including the setting of Donne's sonnet "Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God" for the title character, with the baritone part given to solo trumpet. The resulting score invites you to hear the elusive music — driving passages with pounding timpani, quizzically restrained lyrical flights, bursts of skittish fanfares — on its own terms, apart from its dramatic context.

The St. Louis musicians are thriving under Mr. Robertson's leadership. He has a reputation among orchestras for talking too much in rehearsals. But he certainly speaks engagingly to audiences.

Edited April 6, 2008 by 7/4

[ejp626]

I suppose it is a limitation on my part, but I generally do not care for overtly religious classical music with a few exceptions. Messiaen is one of those exceptions, and perhaps it is because his approach seems so unorthodox. I've seen Quartet for the End of Time performed live 3 times and must have 4 CD versions and a few off the radio versions. I like much of his other work as well, but personally find Quartet the most compelling. Maybe later this week I will try review some of these different versions.

[T.D.]

I like a lot of contemporary music (including much that's considered weird or difficult), and know this is a personal failing/limitation, but generally just haven't warmed to Messiaen.

I am (also) very fond of the Quartet for the end of time, and have attended live performances, but find Turangalila absolutely painful (have seen it live twice). Tried a recording (admittedly Naxos, though Austbo is usually pretty reliable) of 20 regards, and also disliked it. Have a recording of Chronochromie somewhere, and recall it somewhat more fondly, but haven't felt compelled to listen for years.

I think my issue is that when Messiaen tries to communicate a "religious ecstasy" (granted, this may be getting close to cliche territory), he often employs certain intervals or chords (I don't know music theory) that rub me the wrong way. It's not the dissonance, but there just seems to be a certain dubious taste. I even sympathize to a degree with some of Boulez's comments (that's unusual!) re. Messiaen.

Other suggestions would be welcome.

BTW, the Turangalila rave is pretty much a stock NYT item. Essentially the same column seems to run, with variations, every two or three years. Apparently Tommasini, who is more or less the Gray Lady's designated modern music advocate, is high on the piece. Robertson also is the subject of frequent NYT profiles, probably because of his espousal of newer repertory.

Edited February 18, 2008 by T.D.

[A Lark Ascending]

I really like Messiaen; there's a lot I don't understand - passages where my mind drifts, whole pieces where I end up wondering what it was all about. But I do like the colours he employs. Apart from what has been mentioned above I really love 'La Nativite du Seigneur'.

As for his dubious taste...well, most of the 20thC classical music I enjoy has been condemned as being in dubious taste by some expert somewhere. Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Britten, Malcolm Arnold and the like have all been pilloried at some point for their 'vulgarity'.

I'm not remotely religious (although I was raised a Catholic) so the music doesn't send me into spiritual ecstasies. I just like the way it sounds (I can say the same about Bruckner).

Currently listening to:

Not recommended to Turangalila-a-phobes!

Edited February 18, 2008 by Bev Stapleton

[T.D.]

I'm not remotely religious (although I was raised a Catholic) so the music doesn't send me into spiritual ecstasies. I just like the way it sounds (I can say the same about Bruckner).

Currently listening to:

Not recommended to Turangalila-a-phobes!

Agreed on the latter; I used to have a (different) recording of Des Canyons, but wound up trading it...

Funny thing: I was brought up Catholic, remain semi-observant, but still don't get Messiaen. So the religion link seems not to be essential.

[bvy]

Pittsburgh Symphony performed Turangalila last season. It was thirty minutes of lecture (with some orchestral snippets), intermission, then the work itself. Some folks were put off by the format, but I'm not sure what else you could have programmed it with. Its style and length pretty much dominate.

[Chuck Nessa]

Haydn.

[Michael Weiss]

BTW, the Turangalila rave is pretty much a stock NYT item. Essentially the same column seems to run, with variations, every two or three years. Apparently Tommasini, who is more or less the Gray Lady's designated modern music advocate, is high on the piece. Robertson also is the subject of frequent NYT profiles, probably because of his espousal of newer repertory.

From someone who was there, it was a great concert and Robertson gave a wonderful pre-concert talk which I'm sure helped many concertgoers' appreciation of the music.

In addition to Tommasini, millions more music lovers around the world hold Turangalila high on their lists as well. Personally, I like Esa-Pekka Salonen's recording best.

I don't understand the snarky attitude. Apparently you seem really perturbed that others should enjoy music you don't.

Edited February 20, 2008 by Michael Weiss

[T.D.]

Sorry, no snarkiness intended. I like Robertson, never dispute matters of taste.

Intended target was Tommasini for repeating columns, though I applaud his efforts to promote modern works. Wish he would range a bit further than the biggest "names," but that's not the NYT way.

[A Lark Ascending]

I recall hearing Turangalila for the first time in a Prom concert way back in 1976 or 77, sat behind the orchestra with all the percussion in front of my nose. It was thrilling and I still really like the piece.

I got curious about Messiaen after hearing his name dropped - and then hearing a fair bit of his style cannibalised - by the avant-rock band Henry Cow. Anyone familiar with 'In Praise of Learning' will recognise his fingerprints in the organ sections of 'Living in the Heart of the Beast'.

More recently, this British jazz band have overtly incorporated references to his music in one of their compositions:

[7/4]

I got curious about Messiaen after hearing his name dropped - and then hearing a fair bit of his style cannibalised - by the avant-rock band Henry Cow. Anyone familiar with 'In Praise of Learning' will recognise his fingerprints in the organ sections of 'Living in the Heart of the Beast'.

Really...I'll have to give a fresh listen to In Praise of Learning. I love that Cow.

[7/4]

August 12, 2005

Adventures Outside the Classical Canon: Pathfinding Composers

By JEREMY EICHLER

Olivier Messiaen

'QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME' Tashi (RCA Victor Gold Seal 7835-2-RG; CD).

'VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT-JÉSUS' Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist (Teldec 3984-26868-2; CD).

'TURANGALÎLA SYMPHONY' Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa (RCA Red Seal 82876-59418-2; CD).

'DES CANYONS AUX ÉTOILES' Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung (Deutsche Grammophon 471 617-2; CD).

'ST. FRANÇOIS D'ASSISE' Arnold Schönberg Choir, Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano (Deutsche Grammophon 445 176-2; four CD's).

ADMIRERS of contemporary classical music will already know Olivier Messiaen, a founding father of the modern avant-garde and one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music. Although he is almost too famous for this roundup, there are undoubtedly some who have yet to encounter his work, and they have an enviable journey ahead. It can be mapped with reference to three compass points that defined Messiaen's world: a nearly mystical commitment to the Roman Catholic faith; an ability to conjure luminous musical colors, which he blended into radiant stained-glass chords; and a love of nature that compelled him to transcribe his favorite landscapes into sonic portraits of rare depth and imagination.

Messiaen, who died in 1992, was prolific, and his compositions have been served well on disc. Perhaps the most frequently performed work and the one most people encounter first is the ''Quartet for the End of Time.''

A landmark of modern chamber music, it was written in 1940, after Messiaen, who had been serving in the French Army, was captured and interned in a German prison camp in Silesia. Written for the instruments available in the camp -- piano, violin, cello and clarinet -- it is gripping music, spinning apocalyptic themes across eight movements. There is plenty of masterly notated sonic brimstone, not to mention the ''blue-orange lava'' Messiaen cited in a preface, but the piece ends with a sublime, trancelike meditation for violin and piano, an unforgettable musical prayer. The recording by the ensemble Tashi is still the one to have.

In 1944, after meeting the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who would later become his wife, Messiaen wrote ''Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus,'' an epic work for piano structured as 20 ''gazes'' at the infant Jesus. It is some of his most difficult and exhilarating solo music, full of densely packed chords and perplexing rhythms, beatific calm and mystical frenzy.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard's version is definitive and frighteningly convincing.

But solo and chamber music is just a small part of the picture. Messiaen had a penchant for orchestral grandeur, which he indulged in his huge ''Turangalîla Symphony'' (in his words, ''a hymn to the superhuman joy that transcends everything'') and, much later, in his awe-struck tribute to the canyons of Utah and the stars above, ''Des Canyons aux Étoiles.'' The conductors Seiji Ozawa and Myung-Whun Chung both show great insight into Messiaen's music here.

Finally, Messiaen had a famous love of bird song, which he saw as an embodiment of God's perfection. (He once noted dryly that whenever birds sing, you never find ''an error in rhythm, melody or counterpoint.'') He transcribed the songs in travels throughout his life and incorporated them constantly into his music, but never more effectively than in his great opera ''St. François d'Assise.'' The work, triumphantly staged in San Francisco in 2002, is a compendium of Messiaen's compositional techniques, his self-fashioned modes and his flair for glorious sonic anarchy.

Kent Nagano's recording, made live at the Salzburg Festival, is enough to whet one's appetite for the real thing. Maybe someday at the Met? JEREMY EICHLER

[7/4]

February 29, 2008 Music Review | Axiom Ensemble

Painting Nature’s Grandeur With Music

NYTimes

The second week of December 1908 was a happy time for modern music. On Dec. 10 Olivier Messiaen was born in Paris. The next day Elliott Carter was born in New York. Miraculously, Mr. Carter remains alive and active. And though Messiaen died in 1992, his visionary work is being commemorated in concerts around the world.

No anniversary program would have touched him more, I think, than the performance of “Des Canyons aux Étoiles” (“From the Canyons to the Stars”) on Wednesday night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater by the Axiom Ensemble, founded by Juilliard School students in 2005. This is an exhilarating tone poem in 3 parts, divided into 12 movements, a daunting 100-minute score for more than 40 players, including soloists. The piece has orchestral sweep and richness. Yet Messiaen often gives each player an individual part, making the work seem like gargantuan chamber music.

The Axiom players, current Juilliard students and recent graduates, gave an assured, glittering and rhapsodic performance, expertly conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky. And, as constituents of Lincoln Center, the musicians can make a special claim to the piece, which had its premiere at Alice Tully Hall in 1974, performed by the Musica Aeterna Orchestra.

It took some doing, but the patron Alice Tully persuaded Messiaen to compose a work in anticipation of the American bicentennial. Intent on connecting with America’s natural heritage and spiritual essence, he went to Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks in Utah, where he hitchhiked with his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, transcribed birdcalls (his lifelong passion) and stood in awe before rock formations and geological vistas. Messiaen, who had a mild form of synesthesia, a condition in which the neural sensors are a little crisscrossed, heard sounds when he saw colors, and the canyons were a riot of rusty, reddish and earthy colors.

“Des Canyons aux Étoiles” is alive with Messiaen’s musical trademarks: leaping, spiky melodic lines; imperative themes proclaimed in astringent, thick-layered chords; restless rhythmic outbursts that alternate with celestial chorales for strings and winds. The score also abounds in exotic instrumental writing for congas, gongs, tam-tams and a wind machine.

For long stretches the music evolves in halting phrases, almost as if Messiaen were sharing impressions through a series of statements. But in crucial places driving rhythms erupt, especially in the large central movement, “Bryce Canyon and the Red-Orange Rocks,” which is run through with a wildly skittish line played by the ensemble in unison octaves.

The formidably difficult solo piano part, including two prolonged solo movements, was shared here by two pianists, both excellent: Conor Hanick (for the first seven movements) and Matthew Odell (for the rest). James Ferree (on French horn), Tomoya Aomori (glockenspiel) and Chihiro Shibayama (xylorimba) were the other impressive soloists. Messiaen would surely have been pleased to see all these skilled young musicians so immersed in his audacious, mystical and deeply personal work.

[Alexander Hawkins]

I really like Messiaen; there's a lot I don't understand - passages where my mind drifts, whole pieces where I end up wondering what it was all about. But I do like the colours he employs. Apart from what has been mentioned above I really love 'La Nativite du Seigneur'.

As for his dubious taste...well, most of the 20thC classical music I enjoy has been condemned as being in dubious taste by some expert somewhere. Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Britten, Malcolm Arnold and the like have all been pilloried at some point for their 'vulgarity'.

I'm not remotely religious (although I was raised a Catholic) so the music doesn't send me into spiritual ecstasies. I just like the way it sounds (I can say the same about Bruckner).

Currently listening to:

Not recommended to Turangalila-a-phobes!

The solo horn movement - the 'Interstellar Call' - from 'Des Canyons...' is extraordinary!

[7/4]

I'm getting my 1st listen to the Turangalila from a French radio broadcast recording now...I like what I hear!

Olivier MESSIAEN (1908-1992)

PARIS, France

Salle Pleyel

01 FEB 2008

Orchestre Symphonique de la SWR Baden-Baden et Fribourg

dir. Sylvain Cambreling

Roger Muraro : piano

Valérie Hartmann-Claverie : Ondes Martenot

Edited March 3, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

The music of Olivier Messiaen, at the organ in 1972, is the focus of a number of centennial concerts in New York.

April 6, 2008

The Elusive Allure of Olivier Messiaen

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYTimes

ORIGINALITY may be overrated in the arts. All creators emulate the masters and borrow from one another. Big deal! The composer and critic Virgil Thomson routinely debunked what he called the “game of influences,” which he considered “about as profitable a study as who caught cold from whom when they were standing in the same draft.”

But the French modernist master Olivier Messiaen, who died in 1992 at 83, was truly an original. No other music sounds quite like his, with its mystical allure, ecstatic energy and elusive harmonic language, grounded yet ethereal. Rhythmically his pieces slip suddenly from timeless contemplation to riotous agitation then back again, sometimes by the measure. In the introduction to his 1985 book on Messiaen the critic Paul Griffiths calls him “the first great composer whose works exist entirely after, and to a large degree apart from, the great Western tradition.”

There will be many chances to encounter Messiaen this year, the centennial of his birth in Avignon on Dec. 10, 2008, the day before Elliott Carter was born in New York.

An early and ambitious event in the Messiaen commemoration in New York came in February, when David Robertson conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a glittering, rhapsodic account of the 75-minute “Turangalila Symphony,” composed from 1946 to 1948. A large and noticeably young audience turned up at Carnegie Hall to hear this unorthodox and exhilarating 10-movement work: a meditation on joy and creation, on nature in both its pastoral and violent manifestations, and on exalted human love as a pathway to transcendent death.

Also in February the Axiom Ensemble at the Juilliard School performed “Des Canyons aux Étoiles” (“From the Canyons to the Stars”), a kaleidoscopic 100-minute tone poem for 40 players. Messiaen was inspired to write the work by a visit to Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he hitchhiked with his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, stood in awe before rock formations and eagerly transcribed birdcalls (a lifelong passion for Messiaen, a practicing Roman Catholic to whom birds were truly “God’s musicians,” in Mr. Robertson’s words).

In May, New York audiences will have two chances to hear a seminal chamber work, “Quartet for the End of Time,” which was first performed on Jan. 15, 1941, at a Nazi prison camp in Silesia where Messiaen, then a soldier in the French Army, was in captivity. This eight-movement quartet, by turns quizzically contemplative and bursting with defiant abandon, was scored for the only instruments available in the camp, all broken down: an upright piano, a violin, a clarinet and a cello with a missing string. Some 5,000 prisoners heard the performance.

The pianist Mitsuko Uchida will play the piece as part of an “Uchida and Friends” program at Zankel Hall on May 17. And the original members of the adventurous contemporary-music ensemble Tashi (the pianist Peter Serkin, the violinist Ida Kavafian, the cellist Fred Sherry and the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman), reuniting after three decades, are touring with a program featuring “Quartet for the End of Time,” the work that first brought them together. They will perform a free concert at Town Hall on May 4.

Any discussion of Messiaen’s distinctiveness would have to start with his sound world, specifically his harmonic language.

In his youth he was drawn on his own to the piano and to the organ-music heritage of the Catholic Church. By 1919, when his father, an English teacher and translator of Shakespeare, got a teaching job in Paris, Messiaen had entered the city’s renowned conservatory at a remarkably early age. His studies included composition, piano, percussion and the art of improvisation at the organ. At 22 he was appointed organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris, a position he held officially for 40 years, though he continued playing services there until his death. His music-history teacher was a scholar of the modes of ancient Greece and the medieval era (modes being earlier forms of scales that predated major and minor keys).

Even while completing his education, Messiaen adopted a series of modes, contemporary riffs on the ancient ones, with repetitive patterns of half steps and whole steps throughout the scale. He did not actually invent these “modes of limited transposition,” as he called them, noting their employment by composers as diverse as Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin and Ravel. But his extensive and complex adaptation of the modes was new and lent his harmonic language its timeless and exotic character.

To Messiaen certain modes had certain colors: not just aural colors but visual ones. Throughout his life he experienced powerful sensory correlations between sound and color. As Mr. Robertson explained in a talk before the performance of the “Turangalila Symphony,” when Messiaen saw a rainbow, he literally heard a celestial harmony. In speaking about this Messiaen could seem a little peculiar.

Discussing the first transposition of his Mode 2 in a series of interviews with the critic Claude Samuel, Messiaen defined it as “blue-violet rocks speckled with little gray cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold red, ruby and stars of mauve, black and white.”

“Blue-violet,” he added, “is dominant.” Naturally.

Whatever the case, the results are what counts. And Messiaen’s musical language blithely juxtaposes piercing astringencies with lushly sonorous diatonic harmonies, and with Impressionistic chords in homage to his beloved Debussy that can make a Messiaen orchestra sound like a cosmic big band. His piano pieces are filled with thick cluster chords, crammed with too many notes, it would seem, to make the pitches audible. But remove a single pitch from one of those chords, and it loses its shimmer and sounds duller, less pungent, just not right.

In the mid-1940s Messiaen was both rattled and fascinated by the Second Viennese School, the movement that advanced the 12-tone techniques pioneered by Schoenberg. Messiaen, then teaching at the Paris Conservatory, wanted to introduce his students to those theories. But the subject was controversial within the faculty. Messiaen wound up taking a group of students, the young Pierre Boulez among them, off campus. Like a band of renegades, teacher and students explored the techniques together. Though Messiaen never signed on to the system, his exploration profoundly affected his work, making him a more precise and daring composer.

But the dimension of Messiaen’s music that may most set it apart derives from his spiritual life. His faith was innocent, not intellectual. As a child he loved the plays of Shakespeare, especially their “super-fairy-tale” aspects, he said. In the stories of the Catholic faith, as he told Mr. Samuel, he found the “attraction of the marvelous” he had coveted in Shakespeare, but “multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold.” For him the Christian stories were not theatrical fiction but true.

Messiaen espoused a theology of glory, transcendence and eternity. Religious subjects permeate his works, though not the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus. His embrace of the wondrousness of faith is reflected in the essence of his compositions. There is a notable lack of development in his music, a denial of “normal harmonic impetus,” as Mr. Griffiths puts it in his Messiaen book. Instead his pieces seem almost spatial, like a series of musical blocks with juxtaposed panels that variously induce feelings of ecstasy, agitation, contemplation or mystery.

Messiaen’s music often bursts with charged rhythmic energy. A student of Indian music, he incorporated Eastern rhythmic modes into his language to produce irregular but breathless rhythms that can instill passages with an infectiously jerky swing. Take the dizzying “Dance of Frenzy, for the Seven Trumpets” from “Quartet for the End of Time,” in which for nearly six minutes the four instruments play in unison a twisting, circular thematic line that evokes gongs and trumpets announcing the apocalypse. Yet this inexorable music seems to hover in some higher rhythmic (and spiritual) realm, untethered to a regular pulse or meter.

The summation of Messiaen’s creative life came with his only opera, “St. François d’Assise” (1975-83). Though he revered operas by Rameau, Wagner, Debussy and Mussorgsky, he came to believe that the genre was passé. When approached by the Paris Opera to write a work, he demurred. He finally agreed, vowing to write his own kind of opera.

What he created was less like a “genuine opera” than a “musical spectacle,” in Messiaen’s words. Scored for an orchestra of 120 and a chorus of 150, “St. François” has more than four hours of music in eight self-contained tableaus, with scant dramatic continuity. Messiaen, who wrote the libretto, left out the pivotal story of the saint’s conversion, explaining that “sin is not interesting.” Instead we see scenes of St. Francis traveling with a fellow monk, teaching him of perfect joy, embracing a leper at the urging of an angel and, in the final tableau, serenely accepting death as he bids farewell to his beloved birds, while the blinding aura of divine illumination radiates throughout the ecstatic music.

The opera is unorthodox, unwieldy and awesome. There have been only a few notable productions, including one directed by Peter Sellars for the Salzburg Festival in 1992 when Gerard Mortier was in charge. Mr. Mortier has announced his intention to mount a production after he takes over New York City Opera, perhaps in the Park Avenue Armory. I can’t wait.

My only encounter with Messiaen came during his visit to the New England Conservatory in Boston in 1986. I will never forget the enthralling performance he and Ms. Loriod gave of “Visions de l’Amen,” an audacious, wildly joyful and technically formidable work for two pianos.

Taking questions from the audience, Messiaen was visibly moved when a young man asked, “Does a listener have to have had a spiritual experience to appreciate your music?”

“Not at all,” Messiaen answered. But, he added, “it would be the highest compliment to me as a composer if you had a spiritual experience because of hearing my music.”

[Chalupa]

There will be many chances to encounter Messiaen this year, the centennial of his birth in Avignon on Dec. 10, 2008, the day before Elliott Carter was born in New York.

Holy crap! I knew EC was old but not that old!

[7/4]

There will be many chances to encounter Messiaen this year, the centennial of his birth in Avignon on Dec. 10, 2008, the day before Elliott Carter was born in New York.

Holy crap! I knew EC was old but not that old!

plenty of discussion here.

[A Lark Ascending]

"I think I'll have the pheasant. Though could I come and note down its dying cries as you neck it."

[tonym]

Listened to BBc R3 last Friday to hear L'Ascension playing.

Bought the disc below as a result.

Click the link at the top to listen to the broadcast

[A Lark Ascending]

Listened to BBc R3 last Friday to hear L'Ascension playing.

Bought the disc below as a result.

Click the link at the top to listen to the broadcast

'L'Ascension' is beautiful - there's also an organ version. You can get a chunky box of Messiaen's organ music played by Jennifer Bate for sixpence. I've had it two or three years and have only just skimmed the surface - a fine investment:

http://www.mdt.co.uk/MDTSite/product//RRC6001.htm

(It may be out of print or heading that way - I'm sure it was cheaper than the pirce here).

[Michael Weiss]

Listened to BBc R3 last Friday to hear L'Ascension playing.

Bought the disc below as a result.

One of my favorite pieces. Another one, often overlooked, is Trois Petites Liturgies. This is an incredible piece.

I heartily recommend this recording:

[Michael Weiss]

TASHI performs Quartet For the End of Time this Sunday at Town Hall, free!!

[7/4]

May 6, 2008

Music Review | Tashi

’70s Quartet Reunites to Celebrate Messiaen

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT

The Tashi quartet together again, from left, Ida Kavafian, Peter Serkin, Fred Sherry and Richard Stoltzman.

It may not have generated pop-culture buzz the way the reunion of the Police did last year. But Tashi, the contemporary-music quartet, which during the mid-1970s was classical music’s answer to a cutting-edge rock band, played Town Hall on Sunday afternoon. The musicians are on their first tour together in 30 years.

The house was packed for the event, part of the Free for All at Town Hall series. At the end, after Tashi’s rhapsodic, mystical and commanding performance of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” the work that originally brought these musicians together, the audience responded with the classical-music equivalent of frenzied hysteria: a prolonged standing ovation.

The four members of Tashi — the violinist Ida Kavafian, the cellist Fred Sherry, the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and the pianist Peter Serkin — were already notable young musicians when the group was founded in 1973. In the years since, they have all had major careers and maintained their individual commitments to contemporary music. As a fellow member of their generation, who heard Tashi in its heyday, I have to say that they all looked great. Gone are the dashikis, ponytails and love beads. That was then. On Sunday the men wore stylish suits and Ms. Kavafian a simple concert dress.

This program may have set a record for overlapping anniversaries, as Jeff Spurgeon, the classical-music announcer from WQXR, explained to the audience. It was the 35th anniversary of Tashi’s first concert in New York. That historic concert was presented by the violinist and conductor Alexander Schneider, whose centennial is this year. Sunday’s program was financed in part by a grant from the Alexander Schneider Foundation.

This is also Messiaen’s centennial. It was to commemorate his birth that Tashi regrouped for a tour, prominently featuring the work it performed more than 100 times during the 1970s and recorded to acclaim in 1975. Messiaen scored the piece for the four instruments available to him while a captive in a German prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia. With three others he gave the first performance of it there in 1941.

Sunday’s program began, though, with a work that Charles Wuorinen wrote last year in anticipation of Tashi’s reunion, his ingenious arrangements of two Renaissance vocal works: Josquin des Prez’s “Ave Maria ... Virgo Serena,” and Thomas Morley’s “Christes Crosse.” The Josquin emerges here as calmly beautiful, with undulant modal counterpoint. The Morley is restless, alive with fidgety lines that break loose from the harmonic backdrop.

After this the musicians gave a riveting account of Toru Takemitsu’s “Quatrain II,” composed for Tashi in 1977. That was the year that Takemitsu met Messiaen in New York. Messiaen played his quartet at the piano for the younger composer, who was so inspired that he created a work in homage to the piece, incorporating motifs that mimic its themes. Takemitsu captures the cosmic atmosphere and neo-modal harmonic sound world of Messiaen’s music, though his language is more beholden to the 12-tone aesthetic, if not the theory and rules.

The Takemitsu work set the mood for Messiaen’s 55-minute, eight-movement quartet. The Tashi musicians played the piece with as much youthful boldness as ever. The “Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets,” in which the instruments play a skittish, metrically irregular, decisively urgent line in unison for nearly six minutes, bustled with on-the-edge daring. But the contemplative movements were also enthralling, through the final “Praise to the immortality of Jesus,” for solo violin and piano, played with eerie calm and glowing sound.

There are no plans for Tashi to continue as an ensemble. But you never know.

[7/4]

May 31, 2008

Music Review

Portraying Spirituality of Messiaen as Organist

By ALLAN KOZINN

The works of Olivier Messiaen that have traveled best are chamber, vocal and orchestral scores. But Messiaen was an organist, and he composed an imposing body of works for his instrument. This year several organists have taken the occasion of Messiaen’s centenary to make that point. Gail Archer began a six-concert tour of the major Messiaen works in January, and undertook a tour of Manhattan’s organs while she was at it, playing each concert in a different church. For her finale, on Thursday evening, she performed the huge “Livre du Saint Sacrement” (1984) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

This 18-movement, 100-minute work was Messiaen’s last organ score, and it makes the greatest demands on both player and listener. Messiaen was a believer in Roman Catholic mysticism, and to a great extent his complete body of works is a symbolic lexicon through which he explored the mysteries of faith.

For him, meditation was turbulent rather than serene, and belief was a matter of intellectual and emotional struggle rather than of simple acquiescence or platitudinous certitude. And the music he wrote to express his thoughts on divinity — particularly in the “Livre du Saint Sacrement” — tended to be dissonant and texturally broad, with walls of abrasive, reedy timbre supported by heavy pedal tones.

Occasionally, Messiaen stepped back for a gentler, more translucent rumination, as in “La Transsubstantiation” and the two “Prière” movements. Within Ms. Archer’s vivid, muscular performance, in fact, were moments of striking simplicity, most notably the declarative single-line melodies, based on plainchant, that open several movements and seem like straightforward professions of faith before the inevitable grappling with the terrors of the sublime.

In the more expansively dense sections Ms. Archer played with an unflagging power and assertiveness. Those are necessary qualities here: the best way to deal with this score as a listener is to stop wondering why Messiaen painted God in such harsh colors and let the music envelop you. When it does, Messiaen’s vision becomes clear.

Ms. Archer made that possible, but she was working in tough conditions. Listeners who might have been expecting something else began streaming out before the third movement. Others seemed more concerned with taking flash photographs or chatting. And in balancing the need for ventilation against the need for quiet, St. Patrick’s chose ventilation: its unusually loud air-conditioning system rumbled through the entire performance.