SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Messiaen , From the Canyon to the Stars : Pierre-Laurent Aimard, (piano), Jean-Christophe Vervoitte (horn),  Samuel Favre (xylophone), Michel Cerruti (glockenspiel), Ensemble Intercontemporain, Susanna Mälkki (conductor), Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 2. 2.2008 (AO)

Olivier Messiaen at the Grand Canyon

From the Canyons to the Stars is both the title of this symphony and of the whole Messiaen Festival running at the South Bank, and for good reason to.  As the composer himself observed, when you are in a canyon, the only way to look is upwards, towards the stars.  Messiaen was visionary, his soul focussed on the heavens, literally and metaphorically.  In Paris, he spent much of his time in cathedrals, cramped up high above the nave in the organ loft.  In Bryce Canyon, Utah, he experienced a “cathedral” of another kind, where the vast stone walls of the canyon rose up like walls, enclosing space, but opened, roofless to the skies.  Churches were built by man, but canyons by God, the inspiration of everything the composer believed in.  From the Canyons to the Stars, although a relatively late work, is thus an excellent starting point from which to access the world of this most fascinating composer. 

Ensemble Intercontemporain was founded in 1976 by Pierre Boulez to specialise in new music.  Aimard was in fact one of the founder members.  Because its musicians are virtuosi in their own right, the orchestra’s philosophy is well suited to Messiaen’s music, where clarity of instrumentation matters so much. Each detail in music like this needs to remain pure and distinct, not muddied. Susanna Mälkki, the Ensemble’s new Music Director, is able to draw out the best from her musicians while negotiating the complex twists and turns that propel the trajectory.

This is no minor achievement.  From the Canyons to the Stars is two hours long, a series of 12 individual sections.  It’s a huge beast, but not a symphony in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a panorama of unfolding vistas.  Bravely, Mälkki abandoned the frequent practice of dividing the piece into two parts with an interval. Yet, this performance didn’t sprawl into loose confederation because she hard such firm grasp of its inner dynamic  Messiaen observed birds not only for their songs but in their movements.  Sometimes birds creep quietly on the ground, but they can sudden fly off unpredictably. That’s how they survive.  “Man hasn’t been on this earth that long”, Messiaen said.  "Before us there were prehistoric monsters, but in between there were birds". Canyons, of course, are even more ancient than birds or dinosaurs, so they represented for the composer a force even more primeval and closer to his God. Conventional symphonies have an inner architecture like a skeleton.  Instead, Messiaen finds a different kind of structure, more organically based on observation of nature. Thus Mälkki intuited that this music works with an exoskeleton,  for it is these jerky changes of direction, and sudden leaps from noise to utter silence, give the music its overall shape.  This was a perceptive approach which made more sense than trying to fit it into a more obvious “logical” form.

Without doubt, Mälkki is someone to watch, and may become one of the more outstanding conductors of this generation.  Last summer, at the Proms, conducting Boulez and Birtwistle, she showed similar intelligence.  When she conducted Boulez’s Dérive II she brought out its surprisingly powerful, organic lyricism. It seemed to unfurl like a fern, each cell growing out of another, developing and expanding.  Messiaen’s influence on Boulez is deeper than commonly assumed.

The twelve sections of the work revealed themselves as a progression.   Each section is built up from myriad details. Significantly, the smallest instrument in the orchestra, the piccolo, plays an important role, just as the smallest bird in a dawn chorus can be heard distinctively.

The third section, Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles is built around massive, angular blocks of sound.  Before the concert, Mälkki had spoken about the “shape” of Messiaen’s work being as valuable as the colours, so often assumed to be the basis of Messiaen’s music.  The Ensemble produced blocks of sound, reinforced by detail like the “geophone”, a flat drum filled with lead beads, rotated to sound like shifting dunes of sand.  Although it’s very graphic, it fits in with the overall palette of sound rather better than the famous wind machine. Similarly, Mälkki understood the upright and downward thrusts in the music, evoking the craggy peaks and columns in the strange geology that is Bryce canyon, but also Messiaen’s spiritual aspirations.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s two long solos in the 4^th and 9^th sections were beautifully executed.  For a moment, time seems to stand still, while the piano does a “display dance” like a bird showing off its plumage, and then the music progresses back to its normal pace. Jean-Christophe Vervoitte’s horn solo was spectacular. Again, for a moment, Messiaen takes a break from the landscape as a whole, focussing on an individual. The elaborate horn seems to be calling across the desert, across time and space itself. It doesn’t get a reply, even when it repeats itself more quietly, as if from a distance. However, this serves to emphasise the isolation of this landscape, and perhaps, the realisation that there isn’t any need for a response from another terrestrial party, when one is in the presence of the sublime.

The final section, Zion Park et la cite céleste, evolves naturally from what has gone before as dawn follows a peaceful night filed with stars. There doesn’t “need” to be tension before this glorious morning, for in nature, day naturally follows night, eternally, regardless of what happens in the world.  Struggle is a “human” value but humans are irrelevant in this landscape.  Hence the dawn chorus imagery returns in glory.  Glockenspiel and Xylophone are “dawn chorus” instruments par excellence, many individual parts working in unison yet without blurring.  The ostinato angles in this section act like apostrophies urging the music onwards, rather than interrupting the flow. The whole ensemble joins in a riotous crescendo of unalloyed joy. What a nice conclusion to the first part of this excellent South Bank festival.

Anne Ozorio

Picture courtesy of the South Bank Centre

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