Messiaen: From the Canyons to the Stars

Messiaen: From the Canyons to the Stars
Saturday 2nd February 2008
Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London

Messiaen Des Canyons aux etoiles

Pierre-Laurent Aimard piano
Jean-Christophe Vervoitte horn
Samuel Favre xylophone
Michel Cerutti glockenspiel

Ensemble Intercontemporain
Susanna Malkki conductor

6 years ago, it was my first year in the UK. It was my first time going to the Royal Festival Hall to see a concert. The programme was a Mozart piano concerto followed by Messiaen's celebrated Turangulila-Symphonie. The turnout was awful. Apart from the row that my school occupied, the audience scattered around the hall in such a pointillistic way that it was more pointillistic than Messiaen's later work. There were about 30-40 people in the hall and I have never ever seen the RFH that empty ever since.

Yes, it was also my first time seeing Pierre-Laurent Aimard - he was not famous back then and I had no idea who he was - with Dominique Kim on the ondes Martenot and Kent Nagano conducting. Most importantly, it was my first time hearing Messiaen's work, and that opened all gates to my subsequent quest for the wonderous world of contemporary music.

Now in 2008, it is the Messiaen centenary year. The renovated Southbank Centre is doing a year's long of music festival entitled From the Canyons to the Stars for one of the most important composers of the last century, and Messiaen's student Pierre-Laurent Aimard becomes the artistic director of the festival. Tonight's concert was the first concert of the series, given by Aimard and the baby of Pierre Boulez, a student of Messiaen himself, the Ensemble Intercontemporain (EIC), with a number of soloists from the EIC. The conductor was the EIC's fifth and latest Music Director, Susanna Malkki. The programme was the title work of the festival - Des Canyons aux etoiles.

Des Canyons aux etoiles is one of the few Messiaen works that I have always read about but never had the chance to hear it either live or on recording. It is a highly unusual and demanding work in terms of the musical force employed and the sheer duration of the work. Scored for solo piano, solo horn, solo xylophone, solo glockenspiel, 13 string instruments (all playing individual parts), quadruple winds, triple brass and percussion (including the geophone and eoliphone), the sheer number of instruments on stage was an astonishing scene in itself. The work is approximately 100 minutes long - even longer than Mahler's longest symphony, the Third. The work was typically Messiaenian - birdsongs, Heavenly bliss, lots of colour, liberal choice of rhythms, multiple piano solos, you name it. It is inspired by Messiaen's journey to the Grand Canyon and his fascination of Nature, hence in this work he includes the geophone to represent the sand and the eoliphone to represent the wind explicitly.

The journey from the Earth's wonder to the Heavenly wonder takes twelve movements. The piano and horn are each given solo movements but the two tuned percussion soloists are given parts to take on a whole orchestra throughout. The result was a fantastic series of continuous pulses of small explosions. To be honest, if you are not in the mood, the fragments of sounds could be quite irritating, but I was, for once, totally into the music. Never have I found myself paying full attention to the music in concerts and the playing of every member of the ensemble. The Grand Canyonic ensemble of EIC was spot on under the direction of Susanna Malkki, and the extremely clinical sound of ensembleness took everyone away breathless. (It must have been Boulez's training!) Just when was the last time one can hear every single string and every wind instrument with such precision and clarity? It goes without saying that the solo passages are shows of their own right. Aimard was great himself, as always, but the talent of the horn soloist was simply beyond belief. The muted passages, the flutter-tongue, stopped trills and everything in the "Interstellar Call" - one can't even do those vocally, let alone on the notoriously difficult instrument. The percussion soloists were explosive throughout - and I can't wait to see them doing sur Incises later this year! Overall, I left the performance in complete awe.

Yes, it does make a concert particularly enjoyable when you sit right in the middle, slightly to the left so I can see the keyboard, the soloists and the conductor clearly - and it was only 10 quid for students. Real bargain for the 8th wonder of the world. It was truly an honour and privilege to attend the first night of the great festival and I cannot wait to see the following concerts.



This entry is adopted from an earlier blog of mine, which no longer exists.