Magnificent and Aweful

PETER DALE considers Messiaen's impact on the ear

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Each septenary ends with a chorale-like enunciation of the theme of experience and matter transfigured by light and understanding - the first, hushed and awestruck, the second magnificent and aweful. These are wonderfully well sung (in as many as twenty parts sometimes!) Elsewhere, Messiaen's neo-plainchants are enunciated with metre-less tread, dignity and conviction. Once or twice the intonation slips. Once or twice unanimity of articulation is flawed, but these do nothing to spoil the performance of this astonishing music.

Yvonne Loriod (no less!) plays the piano with all its clatter and clarity of birds and birdsong, and there is a battery of superbly executed percussion. Karl Anton Rickenbacher governs the whole immense force of singers, solo instrumentalists and orchestra into tremendous shocks of simplicity and fantastic epiphanies of colour.

I believe this is the only performance available on disc of this massive work, but it is hard to imagine a better.

It is coupled with the same orchestral forces playing the mighty Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, Messiaen's great re-incarnation of the orchestra as a massively transfigured organ (as it often seems to me). This too is superbly well performed. I especially enjoyed Rickenbacher's fearless contextualising of the sounds into very loaded, very long, (very loud) silences.