Tag Archives: Messiaen

Hebrides: Music for Time

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Adelaide Place, Glasgow

All credit to British composer Arthur Keegan, not least for accepting an Olympian challenge to conceive a partner piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The latter, as iconic for its unique language and timeless spirituality as for the fascinating back story that led to its initial creation within a German prisoner-of-war camp, remains one of the 20th century’s most seminal, moving masterpieces.

What Keegan has produced – as demonstrated in its premiere performances by the Hebrides Ensemble while touring Cumnock, Edinburgh, Skye and Glasgow over the past week – does complete justice to the such a formidable task. Coalesce: Quartet for the Start of Life, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, is as much a homage to the Messiaen as a springboard from which Keegan’s imagination takes full independent flight. He addresses the genesis of time – “both biblical and biological” – as opposed to Messiaen’s Book of Revelations-inspired deliberations on the end of time.

As such, Coalesce’s impact in opening Hebrides’ “Music for Time” concert was instantly spellbinding. Scored for the same forces as the Messiaen – clarinet (Yann Ghiro), violin (David Alberman), cello (William Conway) and piano (James Willshire) – and initiated by a simple theatricality (two of the players processing from offstage during the opening bars), we witnessed what amounted essentially to a potent “atomised” splintering and reconstitution of the Messiaen sound world. 

From its fragile elemental opening, rich in atmosphere and awe, it was only a matter of time before Keegan’s purposeful writing revealed cleverly-integrated pre-echoes of Messiaen – snatches of exquisite birdsong and overall glittering euphoria. The performance keenly acknowledged these references, but equally embraced the genuine originality in Keegan’s writing, his solid command of texture, ingenious filtration of referenced material, and ability to surprise. What seemed like an added electronic backing towards the end, for instance, turned out to be the players muted vocalising. A magical closing moment.

At that point, would an instant segue into the Messiaen have added to the power of the musical coupling? Possibly. Instead, Keegan received well-earned applause, the players also requiring that moment to retune, leaving that question hanging teasingly in the air. Maybe worth a try at a future performance?

That said, the spell cast had lingered long enough to touch the opening of the Quartet for the End of Time, the subdued complexity of Liturgie de cristal acting like a mystical reset before the frenetic ecstasy of the Vocalise and Yann Ghiro’s agile monologuing in Abîme des oiseaux. If the Interlude proved more safety conscious than daringly playful, and despite some momentary lapses in absolute synchronisation, the onward journey offered up kaleidoscopic delights: Conway’s immutable cello playing in Louange à l’Eternité; the surreal sonic inventiveness of Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel; Willshire’s supportive pianism; the infinite enchantment of Alberman’s solo violin in Louange à l’Immortalité climbing to its stratospheric sign-off.

More than anything, this was an inspired piece of programming. When the end result constitutes something much greater than the sum of its parts, you know you’ve witnessed a very special event.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

On the same night the BBC SSO released its plans for a challenging and adventurous new 2023-24 season, its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was pre-echoing that explorative spirit directing a concert dominated by one of the eight tableaux, The Sermon to the Birds, from Olivier Messiaen’s only opera, the epic Saint François d’Assise. 

Completed late in the French composer’s life, and premiered in 1975, it’s an encapsulation of Messiaen’s life and music. A self-styled radical, he called on the ecstatic freedom of birdsong, the distinctive qualities of systematic modes and Eastern-inspired rhythms from which his harmonic and melodic sound world was derived, and an engrained Catholicism, to formulate one of the most distinctive modernist 20th century voices.

The tableau performed here from the opera’s central act – The Sermon to the Birds – is perhaps the most demonstrative of this: the cathartic extravagance of its avian counterpoints rich to the point of wild cacophony; the powerful juxtaposition of compressed harmonic colour, constant rhythmic surprises and searing melodies; the spine-tingling exuberance from a colossal of the percussion section; and the heart-stopping intensity delivers by those high-density major chords that finally appear as if to ground the whole experience.

Wigglesworth and an expanded SSO gave it big licks in Thursday’s riveting performance, one which, with the help of assistant conductor Emilie Godden and the luxury of three penetrating Ondes Martenot, was a triumph of controlled and mostly well-coordinated intent. The two soloists, Scots tenor Nicky Spence and bass-baritone Ashley Riches, proved a solid, complementary and emotive pairing, though audience access to the text – surtitles perhaps? – would have facilitated a more detailed appreciation of the French narrative. 

The Messiaen followed an earlier paean to nature, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Wigglesworth’s approach may have been essentially cautious – we’ve witnessed far more impetuous storms and expansive countryside greenery from the SSO in the past – but in this performance he elicited such endearing warmth from the strings and meaningful fluidity from the wind that any brief moments of laxity proved inconsequential. 

The programme is repeated at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Sunday 16 April, 3pm

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds. It is also repeated at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Sun 16 April at 3pm

Quartet For The End Of Time

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PERTH EASTER FESTIVAL: QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME
Perth Concert Hall

While it’s tempting to compare the enforced incarceration Olivier Messiaen would have experienced as a French prisoner of war in 1940-41, when he wrote the incredible Quartet for the End of Time, to the “imprisoned experience” we’ve all been facing in recent months combatting Covid, it’s also perhaps too convenient. 

We’ve at least maintained our basic home comforts; Messiaen and his fellow prisoner-musicians, who premiered the work in 1941, did so on salvaged instruments in the bitter January cold of an overcrowded spartan Stalag VIIIA in what is now southern Poland. Yet the music arising from such adversity is gloriously ecstatic, fuelled by inspiration from the seven angels and trumpets of the Book of Revelation, full of infinite hope and lustrous conviction.

It was a fitting choice of repertoire, then, with which to start this week’s daily series of chamber concerts from Perth Concert Hall, featuring musicians based in Scotland and available to watch on Vimeo via the hall’s own website, or to listen to daily at 1pm on BBC Radio 3. In this single-work opener, pianist Steven Osborne is joined by members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra: violinist Maria Włoszczowska, clarinetist Maximiliano Martin and cellist Philip Higham.

The visual experience is simple but effective, warmed by a blue-wash backdrop, highly appropriate for a composer who envisaged colour as intrinsic to the textures he invokes. The sound recording is rich and penetrating. Above all, the quality of performance is unerringly virtuosic and expressively profound.

From the calm awakening of Liturgie de cristal to the transcendent acceptance of Louange à l”Immortalité de Jésus, this is a paradoxical 8-movement journey of introspective outpouring. Even the infinite timelessness of Abîme des oiseaux (Martin’s soliloquising breathtakingly magical) and Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (the unending elasticity of Higham’s cello melody cushioned by Osborne’s gently pulsating chords) bears a mystical effusiveness.

There is, nonetheless, unbridled drama where Messiaen prescribes it: the abrupt violent outpourings that embrace the otherwise mesmerising lyricism of Vocalise, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps; the biting unisons, like plainsong on steroids, of Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes; or the sugary ecstasy that defines the work’s ripest climax in Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps, where the richest textures unfold before being quelled ultimately by Włoszczowska’s sublime interpretation of the final Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus.

Only momentarily – the final bars of the sixth movement – does a slight unhinging of the tight ensemble occur. Otherwise, there’s very little to complain about in a truly gripping performance of a thoroughly awesome piece.

Ken Walton
Available to watch via www.horsecross.co.uk.