SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

Messiaen, Debussy:  Sandrine Piau (soprano), Madeleine Shaw (mezzo), Catrin Finch (harp), Ueli Wiget (piano), Jacques Tchamkerten (ondes martenot), Ladies of the BBC National Chorus of Wales, BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Thierry Fischer (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 10.12.2008 (GPu)

Debussy, La damoiselle élue

Messiaen, L’Ascension

Debussy, Danse sacrée et danse profane

Messiaen, Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine


Messiaen’s mother was a poet, his father a translator of Shakespeare. There was, then, an aptness in the fact that three of the four works performed in this Cardiff concert exactly one hundred years after Messiaen’s birth should involve a response to powerfully poetic texts.

The evening began with a performance of Debussy’s La damoiselle élue, a classic instance of the interplay between the arts. Rossetti first drafted the poem of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in 1846-1847 but continued to revise and amend the text until 1870. A reworking of medieval dream-vision poetry and of much in the poetry of Dante, fused with a characteristic Rossettian sensuality, the poem became one of the most admired and influential of Rossetti’s poems. It fascinated other poets and visual artists too. Edward Burne-Jones’s gouache, produced between 1857 and 1861 and now in the Fogg Art Museum in Harvard is a particularly fine example of the kinds of visual work produced in response to the poem. Rossetti himself only produced a painting of the subject – also in the Fogg Museum – around 1857-8, some twenty-five years after the poem. A French version of the poem was made by Gabriel Sarrazin and published in his Le Poètes modernes de l’Angleterre (Paris, 1883). It was on this (incomplete) version that Debussy based the text he set. The text set by Debussy actually shifts the emphasis and meaning of Rossetti’s poem a good deal (but then so does Rossetti’s later ‘painting of the poem’!). In Rossetti’s text the whole is a dream-vision, reported by the male lover left behind on earth at the death of his beloved. In Sarrazin’s abridgement of the poem, this figure has disappeared (to be replaced by the mezzo ‘Narrator’) and the tension between earth and heaven and much of the poem’s psychological complexity have gone with him. Still, given the Wagnerian elements in Debussy’s orchestral writing, the homophonic choral writing and much else evident in this early work, La damoiselle élue is a heady mixture of important late nineteenth-century influences and models. Debussy wrote his first version in 1887-1888 and re-orchestrated it in 1902. It is a work of great fascination, and this performance, with its gorgeously hushed opening and with some wonderfully phrased playing in the orchestral introduction confirmed my increasing sense of Thierry Fischer’s masterly touch where modern French music is concerned. Sandrine Piau sang with powerful dramatic intensity, her response to the words of the text subtle and beautifully judged. Her voice is not especially powerful, though, and there were moments when she struggled to project her voice above the weight of orchestral sound. Madeleine Shaw had no such problems, singing with appropriate gravitas and radiance, though without quite possessing the kind of subtlety which Piau brought to her role in the cantata. The Ladies of the BBC National Chorus of Wales sang (bar an initial tentativeness) with tenderness and winning simplicity, and the orchestra met all the demands made upon them.

In La damoiselle élue we had heard one of the earliest of Debussy’s works to achieve a degree of individualised maturity, and something similar might be said of the ‘four symphonic meditations’ which make up L’Ascension and constitute the most significant of Messiaen’s early orchestral works. The orchestral suite was sketched in the early summer of 1932 and orchestrated in 1933; an organ version was produced in 1933-4. Texts are important here too. The pieces have splendidly poetic titles, which are Messiaen’s invention, albeit drawing heavily on obvious sources: Majesté du Christ demandant sa gloire à son père, Alléluias sereins d’une âme qui desire le ciel, Alléluia sur la trompette, alleluia sur la cymbale and Prière du Christ montant vers son Père. Each also has an epigraph, the text on which they meditate musically, all of them related to the office for Ascension Day. The first and last movements carry texts from Chapter 17 of St John’s gospel; the epigraph of the second is taken from the collect of the Mass for the Ascension, that of the third from Psalm 47. In each case the imagery of the epigraph bears a direct relationship to some aspects of Messiaen’s musical language in the piece which follows. There is, as this note on ‘texts’ may suggest, an overarching symmetry to L’Ascension. The ‘prayers’ of the two outer movements frame the ‘alleluias’ of the two central movements. The first movement, scored for brass and woodwind only, is a work of petitionary majesty, was played with dignity and warmth, the brass section perfect in their intonation, the woodwinds subtle in their colouration of Messiaen’s distinctive harmonies. In the second movement, the woodwinds came into their own in the alternatingly intoversive and extroverted alleluias which make up the work, disposed in a straightforward ABABA pattern. Here Thierry Fischer’s relatively slow pacing of the work gave room for Messiaen’s melodic sinuosities to unroll expressively, the strings balanced against the woodwinds in a fashion which created air and clarity. In the alleluias of the third movement, Fischer brought out the scherzo-like qualities of the dance very effectively, the rhythms hard-driven, with the low strings making the most of Messiaen’s wonderful writing for them. The brass writing here is not perhaps Messiaen at his most individual, but Fischer certainly persuaded the listener that the movement had a crucial role in the shape of the whole work. In the fourth meditation, the music is, no trivial sense of the word, thoroughly glorious – to quote one or two of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of glory is to characterise this music: ‘the honour of God, considered as the final cause of creation, and as the highest moral aim of intelligent creatures’; ‘the majesty and splendour attendant upon a manifestation of God’; ‘resplendent beauty or magnificence’; ‘an effulgence of light such as is associated with our conceptions of heaven’. The ‘heaven’ of  La damoiselle élue is essentially languid and sensual. That implicit in the Prière du Christ montant vers son Père is light filled and musically ‘light’. It is scored for a small group of strings which includes only two celli and no double basses. Full of phrases rising step-like, the music’s radiant transparency creates a sense of a leaving behind of the earthly, symbolised, as it were, by the very absence of the basses. Paradoxically the music is both ecstatic and sober in its beauty, both airy and weighty, and such paradoxes were finely articulated in an excellent performance, with the strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales heard to magical effect in the excellent acoustic of St. David’s Hall.

Interleaving Messiaen with Debussy (undoubtedly a major influence on the later composer), the second half of the concert opened with Catrin Finch as soloist in the Danse sacrée et danse profane – the one ‘textless’ piece of the evening. Though played with unindulgent restraint, this was a pleasantly expressive performance, delicate without triviality or weakness and having the clarity of line of a neo-classical frieze. Heard in between Messiaen’s orchestral writing this was refreshing in its relative austerity and its gentleness of manner. Catrin Finch’s playing was a delight and Fischer ensured a perfect balance between orchestra and soloist.

Back to texts with a vengeance: the texts which Messiaen wrote for his Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine (1943-44), with their lavish, exuberant surrealist religiosity (the word is used without any derogatory implications) and their amatory, even sexual, imagery, were one of the elements objected to by early critics of the work. Yet for all their quirky individuality, Messiaen’s texts belong in a recognisable tradition – mysticism, both western and eastern, has often drawn on erotic imagery, has often made use of logically ‘meaningless’ statements, in the endeavour to express its particular ‘truths’. Certainly the integration of text and music is absolute in the Trois petites liturgies. The exuberance of the words, the intensity of their imagery – especially so far as colour is concerned – is everywhere reflected in the music, whether in the writing for the choir (mostly heard in unison) or in the use the score makes of its unique instrumental resources – piano, ondes martenot, celesta, 32 solo strings, vibraphone, maracas, Chinese Cymbals and tam-tam. Trinitarian imagery is everywhere, too. The text is made up of three shorter texts, each representing a different kind of divine ‘presence’: God present in us, God present in Himself and God present in everything. It is no accident that the choir is made up of 36 (3 x 12 voices), that there are three main sound-groups (voices, strings and percussion), or that the texts are often constructed in triplets of repetition. Repetition is pronounced and insistent in the larger design of the work and to bring the work off successfully, given its textural complexity and, paradoxically, the relatively predictable patterning of some of its structures, is no easy matter. Thierry Fischer marshalled his resources admirably in a powerful and effective reading of the work. The sopranos of the choir were on particularly good form in the first of the three liturgies and the choir as a whole contributed some beautifully rapt and quiet singing as well as some incisive unison chanting. Ueli Wiget’s contribution at the piano was apt and purposeful and Jacques Tchamkerten’s deployment of the ondes martenot was discreet and unflamboyant, integrated into the larger orchestral sound more fully than can sometimes be the case. The unison melody which opens the second ‘liturgie’ was a thing of powerfully jubilant beauty and the movement as a whole was powerfully structured around its two contrasting ideas, the sound of the ondes martinot and the fierce chord sequences on the piano contributing to the excitement of the work’s tumultuous divine dance. Perhaps there were just a few moments when orchestra and choir drifted apart, but they were few and slight, especially in a work of such textural complexity. In the final ‘liturgie’ the sense of liberation from the confines of the merely individual and personal (and it is worth remembering that the music was written not long after Messiaen’s release from the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz) was very strong. Both hieratic and lyrical, Messiaen’s writing here achieves a quasi-timeless sense of their static – realised with utter conviction in this performance. The grace and beauty of the work’s final coda were remarkable moments which fulfilled Messiaen’s declared wish ‘to bring about a liturgical act, to transport a sort of office, a kind of organized praise into the concert hall’ (quoted from Claude Samuel’s Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen, 1967). Fischer, soloists, choir and orchestra had, by then, paid a beautiful and moving birthday tribute to Messiaen.

Glyn Pursglove


^{Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page}