Messiaen's Birthday

I can't let today pass without noting that it would have been the 100th birthday of that great 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen, a favourite of mine. I've blogged before about what makes him so great for me, and my enthusiasm only deepens the more I hear his music.

Radio 3 is celebrating the centenary in suitable style: Messiaen was Composer of the Week last week (download the podcast here while you can) and his Quartet for the End of Time was the subject of Discovering Music on Sunday, but there is much more besides. And this after a summer and autumn already packed with Messiaen pieces! I'd be in heaven if I had the time and space to listen to them all.

A Clear Beginning

My 2008 Edinburgh festival season began last night with a trip to the Usher Hall to hear the BBC SSO under Ilan Volkov perform Thomas Adès’s Tevot and Olivier Messiaen’s final work, Éclairs sur L'Au-delà.

Tevot, a recent composition, was described in the programme note (which you can find here) as “effectively Adès’s second symphony”; if that’s the case, at just over 20 minutes long, it’s a fiendishly compressed one. Of course, it’s certainly not the first symphony to consist of a single movement, but the pace of the musical development for the first third or so seemed relentless. The string writing often seemed to be in opposition to what the rest of the orchestra was doing and, just as I had begun to absorb what was happening, the music would shift direction, forcing my ear to retune itself again. However, the piece climaxes with an intensely beautiful, moving treatment of a simple rocking melodic figure that starts out on the strings, is passed along the woodwind and then developed by the orchestra as a whole before the string writing begins to separate itself slightly from the rest of the orchestra again.

I had half-listened to Tevot on the radio a couple of weeks ago, but this was the first time I’d heard any Adès properly. I was certainly left wanting to hear the piece again. I have every intention of investigating his previous work and following his future compositions.

The Messiaen was the piece I was really waiting for. I’ve blogged before about the significance of Messiaen’s music for me, and I’ve loved this work since I first heard it on Radio 3 in 2004 played by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Simon Rattle, whose recording I cannot recommend highly enough.

Éclairs sur L'Au-delà couldn’t be more different from Tevot in many respects. If the latter seemed a bit impetuous at times, Éclairs was more than a tonic: Messiaen certainly takes his time to explore his hope and vision of heaven in 11 movements ranging in length from less than two minutes to more than 11. You’ll be glad to hear I won’t attempt a blow-by-blow account of the piece or performance, but I will, of course, say something.

Éclairs is full of Messiaen’s characteristic tonal colour and rhythmic/harmonic invention. It opens with an incredible chorale for brass. Here—and in the the fifth and final movements, in which the strings take up the song—the almost static harmonies and melody the create an expansive musical space, a sound world that I almost feel able to walk about in. It’s difficult to describe the emotional tone and impact of these movements. Words such as majestic, sombre, rapt and ecstatic come to mind but none of them capture the profound sense of something beyond understanding, beyond tension and peace. I have to say, though, Volkov and BCC SSO didn’t quite put this across as powerfully as Rattle and the Berlin Phil.

There is, naturally with Messiaen, plenty birdsong throughout the piece. Here, the woodwind shone brightly, especially in the gloriously, joyfully chaotic ninth movement, “Plusieurs oiseaux des arbres de Vieu”. But there was some tremendous playing throughout, notably from the flautists.

All in all, it was a fine performance. Bits of Éclairs are filling my head even now. That’s probably my live Messiaen fix for another year or so, so I’d better live off it as long as I can.

Adès on Beauty

I like this comment on beauty from composer Thomas Adès (from an article in the Telegraph on his recent piece about the creation):

"Why would anyone be ashamed of beauty? It's a very 20th-century idea that you might be. Thankfully that's gone."

Vital Sparks: Radio 3

What would life be without it? Radio 3 is the cut and polished diamond of radio in Britain. I love it for the breadth of its music programming. I love it for the fact it presents whole works by default, unlike the bargain basement Classic FM. I love it for the regular new drama, even if I don't always hear it. I love it for the intelligence of its general arts and culture review, Night Waves--head and shoulders above Radio 4's Front Row. I love it for the verve and invention of its new-writing programme The Verb (you must listen to tonight's edition online for Andrei Kurkov's short story). And, as this joyously inventive, hilarous, informative feature from the Between the Ears slot shows, it's been all this and more for 60 years.

Happy birthday, Radio 3!

Des Canyons aux Étoiles

I must attend more live music. No matter how good a recording, it simply can't compare to hearing the resonances shimmer away into the rafters of the concert hall. And shimmer they did last night in the hands of the pianist Benjamin Kobler, the horn player William Purvis and the NJO Summer Academy, under Reinbert de Leeuw's baton.

Des Canyons ... is an epic work: 12 movements of Messiaen's inimitable colour, birdsong, space and rhythmic invention. Its programme is a double journey: while travelling through the deserts, canyons and birdlife of Utah, the listener also traverses a spiritual desert, via fear and awe, on into the life of the resurrected in the celestial city. I, for one, came away from the performance bathed in what felt like it must be the ecstasy of the saints in glory.

Perhaps nowhere in the work is Messiaen's compositional style more tuned to that ecstasy than in the eighth movement "The resurrected and the song of the star Aldebaran" (the brightest star in Taurus, apprently). Messiaen has the knack of transporting the mind to a position in which it seems to be surveying the whole of creation, which he does in this movement superbly. The strings and woodwinds create a cosmic sense of space into which the piano, percussion and individual winds float glistening strands of birdsong to paint the rapturous souls of the resurrected.

There is a lot of piano solo, not least because there are two birdsong movements for the pianist alone. That's one of the joys of the piece for me, and the piano playing was powerful. However, the only movement for solo horn, "Interstellar call", was the high point of the solo work. William Purvis conveyed its structure and emotion beautifully, and his use of the piano as a sounding board at certain points added electrifying resonances beyond those of the hall's acoustic and beyond those to be heard on the recording in my growing Messiaen collection.

Vital Sparks: Olivier Messiaen

Tomorrow evening, I'm off to an Edinburgh International Festival performance of Olivier Messiaen's enormous orchestral piece Des Canyons aux Étoiles, so it seems appropriate to inaugurate a projected series of occasional blog entries on the writers, musicians and artists who most invigorate me with a few words about Messiaen. Over the past few years, I've grown more and more interested in his music. I've yet to undertake any serious reading about him and his work, but his orchestral and piano writing affects me deeply.

Messiaen was a man of strong Christian faith and profound artistic originality. The combination has, apparently, puzzled other avant-garde French composers, but it is essential to the intellectual and emotional content of his works. He can hold the full richness and complexity of faith in a few notes. It never ceases to amaze me how a single Messiaen chord can express so much: the now and the not-yet of trusting God, the simultaneity of joy and sorrow in the soul's present adoration of Christ and its ache for the perfection of heaven. His suite for two pianos Visions de l'Amen is particularly full of examples of this, as is his orchestral work, Éclairs sur l'Au-delà.

The musical colour of Messiaen's work is breathtaking. He was a synaesthete, seeing sounds as colours, and used this as a basis for his musical composition. Birdsong was another strong element in much of his work. I often wonder how his work looked to him. It would never be possible for me to experience what he experienced, but the palete is wonderful and stimulating nonetheless. I've only ever heard his music on CD or on the radio; tomorrow will be my first experience of it in concert. I can hardly wait.