Messiaen: Chronochromie for large orchestra (Time-Colour)

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.

If for many British music students in the early 1960s, modern music ended with Bartók and the neo-classical Stravinsky, the two recordings on this CD disc helped to change all that.

Roger Nichols’s note goes on to relate: ‘The story behind the quartet has often been told: its composition in a wash-house in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia in 1940, its first performance on 15 January 1941 before an audience of 400 fellow prisoners with a piano whose keys kept sticking, and the audience’s response to the work’s life-affirming properties – “I was never listened to”, the composer said later, “with such attention and understanding”.’

The work treats of ‘the abolition of time itself, something infinitely mysterious and incomprehensible to most philosophers of time, from Plato to Bergson’.

In this great recording from 1968, Nichols singles out Gervase de Peyer as supremely equal to his starring role: ‘surely no clarinettist has yet matched his “désolé” tone and phrasing at the start of the third movement solo’.

The substantial coupling is the far less accessible Chronochromie, recorded in 1964 and written just four years earlier. This came about through a subvention from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and had the further benefit that Antal Dorati had conducted the work’s stormy Paris première in 1962. Here the BBC SO respond to the considerable challenges with playing of remarkable accuracy, energy and colour: as Nichols says, with repeated listening, the work’s difficulties become beauties.

Again, both works are newly transferred and remastered to ART standard at Abbey Road Studios.

Olivier Messiaen was born on 10th December 1908 in Avignon. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire from 1919 to 1930 where his teachers included Paul Dukas and the great organist and improviser Marcel Dupré. He developed a very distinctive style in the music and with his deep Catholic faith and love of birds he created a highly original palette in sound which he employed in works for orchestra, small combination of or merely solo instruments or choir. EMI is celebrating his centenary with a collection of 14CDs. Messiaen himself appears as the organist in four CDs of his solo organ music, recorded in from the earliest work up to and including to his then latest work Livre d’Orgue. These four CDs have been newly remastered at Abbey Road Studios.

His wife, Yvonne Loriod, plays the piano in the CD of the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps and his sister-in-law, Jeanne Loriod, plays the ondes-martenot in the Turangalila Symphony with Michel Beroff and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by André Previn. Although most works have been issued on CD before some are rare – e.g. 2 CDs of Melodies – and two are making their first appearance in this medium: Quatre etudes de rythme and Cantéyodjâya played by Beroff and Ogdon respectively. This is a fine set to introduce yourself to one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.