Messiaen reviews

Messiaen’s music is always about something. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he was convinced that music could convey or embody meaning and he spoke volumes about what his music was portraying. Anyone thinking that Messiaen’s loquacity leaves little else to discuss would be speedily disavowed by Richard Burton’s absorbing and thought-provoking Messiaen: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts (1937–48).

Tom Winpenny’s second Messiaen disc usefully collects various early pieces. Everything here dates from before the watershed of La nativité. Messiaen’s musical voice is already clear, but the shadows of Dupré and Tournemire understandably loom large. The former’s influence is most apparent in the rather laboured first panel of the Diptyque. It never really catches fire in Winpenny’s hands, but then it rarely does. His phrasing is exquisite, by contrast, in a relatively brisk approach to the second part (the bit reused in the Quartet for the end of Time).

The music is truly extraordinary. ‘L’amour et la foi’ (Love and faith) presents a trinity of Messiaen’s vocal works. The explicitly religious love of Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine is juxtaposed with the surreal and erotic love of Cinq rechants, the short communion motet O sacrum convivium! providing a buffer between these works’ intense emotions.

Asked to write a work for the bicentenary of the US Declaration of Independence, Messiaen initially demurred. Finding even Paris a terrible strain, he found nothing to celebrate in America’s forests of skyscrapers. Fortunately, he realised that there is another America, in the national parks, notably the canyons of Utah. To misquote Wilde, Messiaen’s 100-minute, 12-movement celebration of nature and faith reflects that while we are all in the canyons, some of us are looking at the stars.

Messiaen’s music is not genteel. His nine-movement organ cycle La Nativité du Seigneur may include some tableaux that evoke scenes on a Christmas card, but there is also an ever-present sense of vast cosmic forces at work. Messiaen makes this explicit by evoking the shadow of the cross in the seventh movement, ‘Jesus accepts suffering’, but the enormity of what is being portrayed means there is nothing half-hearted anywhere in the cycle.

It is hard to be indifferent to Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie. This ten-movement rambunctious celebration of overwhelming love has far too much going for it: an exotic combination of big juicy tunes, advanced compositional number-crunching and a huge palette of orchestral colour. As a work of extremes, it can also be hard to capture it in the studio.

Gillian Weir’s career has been entwined with Messiaen’s music since her student days, so these previously unreleased 1966 recordings make a fascinating companion to her more recent complete survey (Priory). The release is especially timely: with the Royal Festival Hall’s organ recently reinstalled after a lengthy refurbishment, here the instrument is captured in prime condition early in its life. It sounds marvellous, especially in a recording that was demonstration class for its time.

Japanese pianist Momo Kodama’s first disc for ECM is a beautifully conceived programme. In all three works the notes represent much more than mere abstract sounds, yet each also marks a remarkable exploration of piano sonority. In both respects, this marks a shared French heritage, albeit from a Japanese perspective in the case of Takemitsu (for that matter, Messiaen loved all things Japanese).

Messiaen and Saariaho may overlap little in terms of specific technique, but there is a clear artistic affinity in their music. In the words of Peter Sellars’s eloquent booklet essay, they share a ‘taste for the invisible and yearning for the transcendent’, making their pairing on this beautiful disc from pianist Gloria Cheng exceptionally rewarding.

Does any title underplay, misrepresent even, a work more than Catalogue d’oiseaux? Its connotations of a dry list say more about the parsimonious aesthetic context of the 1950s than the abundant riches found in Messiaen’s masterpiece. These 13 nature portraits are full of drama and musical invention, with Messiaen constantly finding new ways to convey his experience of the French countryside. This vast cycle is a Herculean challenge for the pianist, demanding virtuosity, profound poetry, a keen ear for colour and the finest nuances of touch.

Turangalîla is one of those works that is always an event and a challenge. Messiaen’s joyous amalgamation of unfettered emotion and experiments in musical time is incredibly rich in detail, yet remarkably direct in expression. For that reason, while there are many notes to negotiate, any performance must keep sight of the romantic, sometimes disturbing, core of the work.

On 24 September 1969, John Ogdon gave a performance of Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus in Warsaw. In the audience was Eugeniusz Knapik, a young composer and pianist, who later recalled that he spent the next three days walking as if in a delirium. Ten years and a day after the concert, sessions began for Knapik’s own recording of Messiaen’s monumental cycle. It should have been released in 1981, but it was a casualty of the imposition of martial law in response to the Solidarity movement, and is only now seeing the light of day.