Olivier Messiaen

[stuartjewkes]

I also saw L'Accension on TV from the Proms and was immediately blown away. I had never heard of Messiaen before and had tuned in for the Saint-Saene piece later in the program.

I popped to the shops this weekend hoping to find a recording of the piece but it seems that many other people had the same idea and the only version available was in a £60 box set well out of my budget.

I ended up going for a double CD performance of Turangalila and Quatuor pour la fin du temps that was going cheap and I'm now about half way through Turangalila. It is mystifying and massively varied. This is probably the most excited I have been about a classical composer. I usually listen to my classical collection with a detached interest but this stuff really strikes me emotionally.

Thanks for a fascinating thread 7/4!

[7/4]

Sure thing!

I have some radio recordings of his organ music that I have to dig into and check out.

He certainly was influential and had lot of students who were also influential.

.

[ejp626]

I also saw L'Accension on TV from the Proms and was immediately blown away. I had never heard of Messiaen before and had tuned in for the Saint-Saene piece later in the program.

I popped to the shops this weekend hoping to find a recording of the piece but it seems that many other people had the same idea and the only version available was in a £60 box set well out of my budget.

I ended up going for a double CD performance of Turangalila and Quatuor pour la fin du temps that was going cheap and I'm now about half way through Turangalila. It is mystifying and massively varied. This is probably the most excited I have been about a classical composer. I usually listen to my classical collection with a detached interest but this stuff really strikes me emotionally.

Thanks for a fascinating thread 7/4!

Not sure you can watch the L'Accension TV programme from outside the UK, but this link will take you to the radio broadcast and you can listen again for about 5 days: Prom 14 - Messiaen

[ejp626]

Not sure you can watch the L'Accension TV programme from outside the UK, but this link will take you to the radio broadcast and you can listen again for about 5 days: Prom 14 - Messiaen

Whoops - this is La Transfiguration. Anyway, the link should work through Sunday morning. I'm about to listen myself.

It looks like a handful of very good Messiaen recordings have been added to eMusic. If they haven't been listed in the thread I'll add some a bit later.

[stuartjewkes]

Not sure you can watch the L'Accension TV programme from outside the UK, but this link will take you to the radio broadcast and you can listen again for about 5 days: Prom 14 - Messiaen

Whoops - this is La Transfiguration. Anyway, the link should work through Sunday morning. I'm about to listen myself.

It looks like a handful of very good Messiaen recordings have been added to eMusic. If they haven't been listed in the thread I'll add some a bit later.

Yes please, I'll be picking up anything Messiaen related from my eMusic this month.

[7/4]

August 17, 2008

Music

A Taste for the Natural, and Celestial

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

OLIVIER MESSIAEN, the visionary French composer who died in 1992, experienced a form of synesthesia, sensing colors when he heard certain sounds or harmonies. Much of his music can certainly have a synesthetic effect on the listener, who during the third movement of “Des Canyons aux Étoiles” (“From the Canyons to the Stars,” 1971-74) might imagine multicolored paintballs exploding against a white canvas in a Jackson Pollock-like frenzy.

This glittering 12-movement orchestral suite was inspired by Messiaen’s 1972 visit to southern Utah and commissioned by the patron Alice Tully in honor of the American bicentennial. It is included in a six-CD boxed set of recordings of works from different periods of his life, originally released on Montaigne and now reissued on the Naïve label in honor of the Messiaen centenary.

Messiaen, a practicing Roman Catholic, described “Des Canyons” as “an act of praise and contemplation” that “contains all the colors of the rainbow.” A composer with a distaste for cities, he was deeply interested in the cosmic, the religious and the natural worlds. Nature, he said, “never displays anything in bad taste.” He had a particular fascination with birds, which he called “the earth’s first musicians,” and this ornithological obsession manifested itself in the transcriptions of bird songs that feature prominently in many of his works. In “Des Canyons,” he represents varieties of orioles with piano, xylorimba and woodwinds.

Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schoenberg Ensemble evoke the striking canyon panoramas with energy and finesse. Marja Bon, a pianist, makes impressive contributions, as does Hans Dullaert in a haunting horn solo. The musicians bring the requisite awe to the finale, “Zion Park and the Celestial City,” which intersperses an ecstatic brass chorale with bird song and conjures a blinding sunrise with a triumphant A major chord of shimmering strings. A peak in Utah was later named Mount Messiaen.

The other major work here is the luminous “Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ” (1965-69), a majestic piece for large choir and orchestra and seven instrumental soloists. Mr. de Leeuw leads the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir and the Brussels BRTN Choir.

Based on texts from Thomas Aquinas, the Gospels and the Latin liturgy, the composition reflects Messiaen’s many musical influences (among them, Debussy, Indonesian gamelan and Greek and Indian rhythms) and his stylistic trademarks (frenzied, rhythmically complex outbursts, kaleidoscopic and exotic percussion, modal harmonies, lyrical interludes and dramatic chord clusters). The fiendishly virtuosic piano writing is played excitingly here by Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s second wife.

There is plenty of bird song intertwined with the transcendent music of “Transfiguration,” from calm melodies to the almost cacophonous “Candor Est Lucis Aeternae,” in which it sounds as if rival bird gangs were battling it out with one another and the singers. The ensembles sound luminous in movements like “Choral de la Sainte Montagne” and “Choral de la Lumière de Gloire.” The choruses sing their plainsong-inspired music with passionate solemnity, and the soloists and vast orchestral forces illuminate the complex score’s myriad colors with fervent devotion.

The almost dizzying palette of “Sept Haïkaï” (1962), inspired by a visit to Japan, is brilliantly illuminated by Pierre Boulez (a student of Messiaen, whose pupils also included Karlheinz Stockhausen and the English composer George Benjamin), the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Ms. Loriod.

Messiaen’s sensation of colors was integral to “Sept Haïkaï,” in which he described particular sonorities representing varying hues, like the “green of the Japanese pines, the white and gold of the Shinto temple.” It also inspired “Couleurs de la Cité Céleste” (1963), a work for piano and small orchestra in which Messiaen musically expresses his vision that “the light of the city was like crystalline jasper.” The musical brushstrokes are conveyed by Ms. Loriod and the ensemble, who also vividly explore the intricacies of “Oiseaux Exotiques” (1955-56) and “Un Vitrail et des Oiseaux” (1986). These performances were recorded live at a 1988 concert celebrating Messiaen’s 80th birthday at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

The boxed set also includes “Visions de l’Amen” (1943), a piano duo that hints of the marvels to come in “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus,” the mammoth solo work Messiaen wrote the next year for Ms. Loriod. “Visions” is performed here with sensitivity and startling muscularity by Maarten Bon and Mr. de Leeuw. The final movement sounds as though hundreds of bells were pealing simultaneously over the playing of a jubilant organist.

Messiaen, whose prose was as colorful as his music, described those moments as evoking “the entire rainbow of the precious stones of the Apocalypse ringing, clinking, dancing, coloring and perfuming the light of life.”

[7/4]

It is included in a six-CD boxed set of recordings of works from different periods of his life, originally released on Montaigne and now reissued on the Naïve label in honor of the Messiaen centenary.

I have some of this music on Montaigne, this is exciting stuff!

[A Lark Ascending]

Whilst driving around on holiday I chanced on a broadcast of the last ten of the 'Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jesus' and was smitten - I'd always expected something arid and forbidding.

Led me into something of a Messiaen-fest over recent days.

I read this at virtually one sitting:

A relatively short (240 pages) bio that gives you the context and chronology of the music. Light on musical analysis (a plus for me as I usually don't understand it!). Recommended to anyone who is interested in Messiaen but doesn't already have a deep knowledge.

I've popped some of his shorter pieces (that get can lost in couplings with larger works) on the ipod - really enjoying hearing things like 'L'ascencion', 'Oiseaux exotique', 'Couleurs de la citie celeste' and two organ pieces - 'Lw Banquet Celeste' and 'Apparition de L'Eglise Eternelle' in their own right.

[A Lark Ascending]

Just acquired this as a download from the DG website:

Very interesting disc:

1. Concert à quatre

2. (Les) Offrandes oubliées

3. (Un) sourire

4. (Le) Tombeau resplendissant

1 + 3 are very late pieces; highly accessible - 1. sounds like Debussy in places! 2 + 4 are some of his earliest orchestral pieces, owing a good deal to Firebird era Stravinsky. Interesting because according to the bio he was highly critical as a young man of the later neoclassical-era Stravinsky (and neo-classicism in general).

[7/4]

that book looks interesting, it could get me rolling in the direction of Messiaen more often.

*

Olivier Messiaen – Livre du Saint Sacrement (1984)

Herz-Jesu-Kirche, Munich (Germany)

June 15, 2008

Elisabeth Zawadke – Woehl-Organ (III,61)

Right now I'm listening to this radio broadcast I downloaded off the net, new to me - I've never heard any *modern* music on the king of instruments.

I think Woehl is the name of an organ builder.

edit: I'm really enjoying this recording.

Edited August 18, 2008 by 7/4

[A Lark Ascending]

Right now I'm listening to this radio broadcast I downloaded off the net, new to me - I've never heard any *modern* music on the king of instruments.

I mentioned it before, but I strongly recommend the organ work 'La Nativite du Seigneur'. It was the first Messiaen I bought c.1975, on the back of the organ solo in the centre of Henry Cow's 'Living in the Heart of the Beast'. It has the same immediacy that the Quartet for the End of Time has.

I'm still working on the longer organ pieces!

[Alexander Hawkins]

I played once on Messaien's instrument at La Trinite - it's a very idiosyncratic organ, and it's really instructive to hear his music played on it - it makes his often curious registration markings make complete sense. On other instruments, they need more 'interpretation'.

To lovers of Messaien's organ music, I would really very strongly recommend some of the music of his successor as titulaire at La Trinite, Naji Hakim - really great stuff, and very much in the footsteps of his 'master'. He is similarly an outrageously good improviser!

[Late]

I just ordered the complete organ works (6 CDs) yesterday. I don't know why it wasn't titled Organissimo. Very much looking forward to digging in.

I may never have to buy another CD again.

[ejp626]

For anyone in the Chicago region, there will be a Messiaen festival sponsored by U of Chicago: http://chicagopresents.uchicago.edu/messiaen/

I'm hoping to see the events on Oct. 5 and Oct. 10, but it may not work out.

I've seen Quartet live three times, and this would be the fourth if it all works out. All were fairly memorable, particularly my first (in Ann Arbor) and third (Cambridge England at King's College).

[7/4]

20th-century agenda: Messiaen

.

[Niko]

I just ordered the complete organ works (6 CDs) yesterday. I don't know why it wasn't titled Organissimo. Very much looking forward to digging in.

I may never have to buy another CD again.

just listened to these one minute sound samples of messiaen playing his organ works...

http://www.amazon.de/Orgelwerke/dp/B000002...380&s=music

WOW, thanks for the hint!

[tonym]

Might have to have this one day...

[7/4]

Might have to have this one day...

Somewhere down the line I'll probably need one of those.

Right now I'm just starting to check out the Messiaen Edition, only 16 CDs (!). A friend loaned me a copy...

October 6, 2008

Music Review | 'Six Saturdays With Messiaen'

Reverence and Rapture, Expressed by an Organ

By STEVE SMITH

CLASSICAL REVIEW

Messiaen Festival off to a rousing start

By John von Rhein | Chicago Tribune critic

October 6, 2008

October 7, 2008

Music Review | Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Intense Colors Amid the Ethereal Melodies

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

Edited October 7, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

I snagged a copy of this at B&N this afternoon, probably paid too much for it:

Par Lui-Même

Messiaen

[Guest youmustbe]

The organ stuff is basically Olivier jerking off.

His piano music is interesting/good.

His orchestral stuff I can't comment on since I don't like orchestral music.

His opera St, Franicis whatever is total crap.

His reputation is based in large part on the lack of really 'good' late 20th century music, plus all that French bullshit about the 'Resistance' and all that.

There is much more interesting 21st Century classical music being composed and performed today than old Ollie!

Don't be a sucker and fall for this mildly interesting music just because the 'experts; told you it's 'great'.

It isn't it.

[P.L.M]

Is it a joke or are you as stupid as you sound?

(Like "Olivier" would have say in his native language, if he wasn't so polite "ce type est complètement abrutis. Quel con!")

Edited February 21, 2009 by P.L.M

[A Lark Ascending]

Is it a joke or are you as stupid as you sound?

(Like "Olivier" would have say in his native language, if he wasn't so polite "ce type est complètement abrutis. Quel con!")

I suspect he'd have just written another piece in response and called it "L'Assertion".

[7/4]

The organ stuff is basically Olivier jerking off.

His piano music is interesting/good.

His orchestral stuff I can't comment on since I don't like orchestral music.

His opera St, Franicis whatever is total crap.

His reputation is based in large part on the lack of really 'good' late 20th century music, plus all that French bullshit about the 'Resistance' and all that.

There is much more interesting 21st Century classical music being composed and performed today than old Ollie!

Don't be a sucker and fall for this mildly interesting music just because the 'experts; told you it's 'great'.

It isn't it.

I'm listening because I'm attracted to it, not because I "should" like it. I don't know how I missed it all these years.

[Guest youmustbe]

If you like it ENJOY IT!

Don't let me stop you.

You don't need my seal of approval.

btw I lived as a child in Paris, have a sister that has lived there most of her life and raised a family,.... my wife I met in Paris and she lives there...I go there as often as I can... and believe it or not, I actually have friends who are 100% French, both in Paris and here in NYC.

Messiaen is like Tristano.. a one trick pony...a great teacher and an inspirational figure but that does not make him a great composer.

I like his piano music, especially the regards to jesus (I have the Ogdon lps).

But his organ music is like Keith's Spheres, whacking off.

And please name me a post WWII opera that anyone gives a crap about? He's not the only one that's 'failed'. There's a reason why Boheme packs them in performance after perfomance and 'modern' operas are performed at the Julliard school.

[7/4]

He's much better at it than Keith Jarrett!

Opera....that bloated art form. I don't have too much of an opinion on that unless I get paid to write one.

dB