SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Prom 6, Messiaen, Saint-Saëns: Olivier Latry (organ) Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Myung-Whun Chung (conductor), Royal Albert Hall, London,  21. 7.2008 (AO)


The organ at the Royal Albert Hall is a national treasure. Restored to its full glory a few years back, it’s the second biggest in the world with 9999 pipes, 150 stops, 4 keyboards and numerous pedals. But organs don’t tour, and concerts in a space as big as the Royal Albert Hall aren’t easy to arrange. So it’s high time that the BBC Proms made the most of this exceptional asset and gave the organ full star billing, as they did on the First Night. The European organ tradition is definitely something to celebrate but how often do we get a chance to indulge ourselves? Opportunities afforded in this year’s Proms should be relished.  Just across the road from Door 9, in a beautifully-frescoed building, is the Royal College of Organists, and the best organists in the world are converging on London this year for Messiaen, one of the greatest composers for the genre. So it’s wonderful that the BBC Proms should at last give the mighty Willis organ its due : it’s a natural asset.

This Prom started with the transcription for solo organ of Messiaen’s early work L’Ascension. In many ways it’s more polished than the orchestral version which will be heard at Prom 27 on 6^th August, though it’s performed far less frequently as it needs an organ and performance space that does it justice.   Olivier Latry is the titular organist at the Notre Dame de Paris, and a charismatic Messiaen specialist, so this performance was definitely a pilgrimage event for devotees. The Royal Albert Hall can deliver with depth and spread few others can match, entirely fitting for a piece that celebrates the ascension of Christ into heaven.  It’s supposed to be glorious. When those chords reverberate into the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall, suddenly its cavernous expanses illuminate as if lit up by the rays of the sun. This magnificent monster of an organ really does capture those massive chords and sudden blasts of sound which strike out like the sun's rays. Yet Latry also produced the delicate birdsong which is at the soul of Messiaen’s music. Birds are fragile, the complete opposite of mighty organs, but they represent nature.  As Messiaen said, they may be vulnerable but they outlived the dinosaurs. So when Latry played the quirky little twitterings of Messiaen’s birds the vast organ transformed into something light and lively.

You might have been mistaken that you were hearing the organ again in the massive, long chords that start Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.  They cleave through space like a powerful force of nature, yet they are created only by brass and winds, principally trombone and tuba. Then suddenly the percussion explodes, the organ this time replicated by gongs and cymbals. It’s incredibly compelling, yet requires small though unorthodox orchestral forces. No wonder it’s the piece being played most frequently all over the world this year of Messiaen’s centenary.

It was originally commissioned by the French government as a showpiece to commemorate the dead of two world wars. But Messiaen wasn’t one for public platitudes. For him, death was only an interlude before an eternal afterlife.  The government couldn’t very well object since he had been a prisoner of war himself and so might very well have ended up with the war dead too.  Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum is a counterpart to the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time.  Both pieces see beyond earthly suffering, focussing on the prophecy that, at the End of Time, all who have died through millennia shall be resurrected.

The massive walls of sound in this piece represent the earth itself, a primeval sound like the moving of continents, earthquakes that break open the earth’s crust. It’s mightily organic writing in both sense of the word : Birtwistle’s Earth Dances, magnificent as it is, is but an echo. Those familiar with other Messiaen works might also recognise the “walls” in L’Ascension, Des Canyons aux Étoiles and so on. Indeed, Messiaen dreamed that Et exspecto might ideally be performed in mountains, sound bouncing from peak to peak, reverberating deep into valleys. Truly, the Royal Albert Hall must be the closest alternative. That overwhelming rush of sound, percussion waves ripping across the orchestra, was cataclysmic. The very earth is torn asunder, as the dead of millennia rise again and are reborn. Of course this music is loud, propelled by relentlessly solid blasts of brass and percussion: the End of Time is indeed a cataclysm. For Messiaen, the world does end with a bang, not a whimper.

Like the movement of tectonic plates, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum generally unfolds slowly, without obvious progression. Instead it’s like a slow procession punctuated by minute long periods of complete silence which are as much part of the piece as the music itself. Myung-Whun Chung observed these faithfully, because what Messiaen is doing is turning the music inwards, “into” the listener, a cue to contemplate the mystery “beyond” mere sound. This is another of Messiaen’s great challenges: he combines different concepts of space and time so that they operate simultaneously, processed by the listener’s mind. Loud as parts of this piece may be, it’s not volume simply for its own sake. Again, as in all Messiaen, the details are essential. The clarinet, oboe and flute parts were gloriously clear and poignant, and the gamelan’s quirky rhythms wonderfully evoked the way birds move and sing : nature and orchestration in perfect correspondence.

Particularly impressive in this performance was its uncompromising, rough-hewn quality that really brought out its primordial, antediluvian depths.  In some ways, the savagery of this performance outclassed Boulez in recording (though I suspect that Boulez live and in the Royal Albert Hall would lift us out of our skins). The banks of brass and percussion were magnificent, the crashing cymbals and gongs relentless and tense, the gamelan creating a wild frisson. Chung’s hands bristled tension, and tension is what his players produced.  This was perceptive, as the End of Time isn’t a wimpy cop-out anticlimax.  Those who listen to the re-broadcast on BBC Radio 3 might listen out for the “circular” effects in the percussion, where there’s marked rhythmic progression. At the very end, one of the small gongs flew off the stand and the percussionist had to improvise. It’s not very noticeable, but there is a difference, so carefully nuanced is Messiaen’s writing.

The wildness in Et exspecto was definitely part of the interpretation, for the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France showed how well they can do refinement in Saint-Saëns’s Symphony no.3 “The Organ”.  It’s lovely to listen to, its elegance barely shaken by the entry of the organ part way through. It’s interesting to reflect on the differences to which the organ is put in these two works. In Saint-Saëns it extends the depth of the symphony: in Messiaen, it “is” the music, even when, as in Et exspecto, it isn’t even present.

Anne Ozorio

This Prom and all Proms in this season will be available on BBC’s Listen Again facility for one week after the performance.

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