SACDs - Messiaen

Music in the early 20th century did pass from one medium to another, from late Romanticism into an unknown future. Refractions allows the listener to sample this transition through the choral music of four very different composers.

Reinecke's work is a musical re-telling of the well-known story of Undine, the water spirit who marries a knight, but is betrayed and takes her revenge on him. Frank Martin's virtuosic Ballade (1939) features an acrobatic flute cadenza, roaming melismas and irrepressible cascades, generating a compelling sense of drama. In 1945, while in exile during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Martinu composed his Flute Sonata, in which the virtues of his distinct musical language are plain to hear - lyrical lines, a rhythmic drive which is both energetic and lively and an effective use of tone colour. Six years later the bird-lover Messiaen composed Le merle noir, constructed around the song of the blackbird, which he painstakingly noted down and then found the means to imitate on the flute. Poulenc's melodic Sonata, finally, has become a signature work for its composer: its lightness, transparency and sonic refinement have charmed audiences ever since the first performance.

Japanese pianist Momo Kodama follows up her acclaimed recording of Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus with this new recording of the same composer’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux. The three-disc set is available as a 2-channel Hybrid SACD.

Momo Kodama is equally in demand as a recitalist and chamber musician. She regularly performs with violinist Yuzuko Horigome, and has formed memorable partnerships with Steven Isserlis, Nobuko Imai, Regis Pasquier, Dmitri Makhtin and her sister Mari. A large part of her repertoire is dedicated to music of modern times including Arvö Pärt, Toru Takemitsu and Olivier Messiaen. Having studied the Turangalîla Symphony with Yvonne Loriod, Momo Kodama was asked by the composer's widow to premiere Messiaen‘s Fantaisie pour violin et piano (written in 1933 but never performed in public), which she did at La Roque d'Anthéron with Isabelle Faust. She has already recorded Messiaen’s other great solo piano work, Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus, for Triton to great critical acclaim.

Messiaen, who was an enthusiastic and accomplished ornithologist, investigated for his Catalogue d'Oiseaux 13 birds with their songs and their specific sound environments, and travelled the world in search of new species. The thirteen pieces in the catalogue, however, are devoted to birds in France.

Markus Bellheim begins this series with a major piece, one in which various key elements of the composer’s later music come well to the fore. Bellheim has performed the complete works of Messiaen several times and has worked with contemporary composers such as Kurtág and Rihm. His CD of Piano Works by Rihm (NEOS10717/18) was highly praised.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra focused extensively on Messiaen in its 2007-8 season. A major musical figure of the 20th-century, Messiaen (1908-1992) created an entirely unique musical oeuvre in which such divergent elements as divinity, as it relates to Catholicism and other doctrines, ornithology and the synaesthetic perception of sound as colour are all interconnected with his innovative rhythmic and harmonic musical language and tonal organisation. As a thinker and teacher, Messiaen carried out groundbreaking work in music during the second half of the century, but his work as a composer has remained unsurpassed. During this special season, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra programmed works not only by Messiaen himself, but also compositions by his musical predecessors, students and disciples, including three premières of works commissioned by the RCO: Geert van Keulen's orchestration of Paul Dukas's La plainte, au loin, du faune…, Marc-André Dalbavie's La source d'un regard (The Source of a Look) and Robert Zuidam's Adam Interludes.

With this second release in the Horizon CD series, dedicated to contemporary repertoire, RCO Live has captured this resounding homage to Olivier Messiaen in superb five-channel stereo.