Messiaen: Preludes (8)

“A third composer hovers, ghost-like, in pianist Cheng's beguiling recital with the Calder Quartet. Listen to Messaien's glassy chords and Saariaho's cool rhapsodies and you can almost hear him...Debussy is the daddy. Exquisitely shaped playing and bold musicianship in a compelling, haunting disc.” The Independent, 24th February 2013 *****

“By pairing [Messiaen's Préludes] with a Prelude and Ballade by Kaija Saariaho, Gloria Cheng points to family resemblances, and joins the Calders for Saariaho’s uncharacteristically open-hearted Je sens un deuxième coeur.” Financial Times, 9th March 2013 ***

“[Cheng's] long association with Messiaen's music bears fruit in a fluid approach to the early Preludes...With Cheng's fine touch paramount in first recordings of Saariaho's Prelude and Ballade, this disc is unlikely to gather dust.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2013 *****

“the affinities [between the two composers] are powerful, and they make for a revealing disc. Cheng brings plenty of idiomatic colour to bear on Messiaen's early Preludes” Gramophone Magazine, May 2013

“I'll be very surprised if a more accomplished centenary tribute to Messiaen appears than this one. Pierre-Laurant Aimard knew the composer and studied with Yvonne Loriod… …Aimard achieves insight through clarity, a quality aided by superb sound-recording, with a rich range of meticulously graded dynamic levels, and just the right amount of space and resonance around the instrument.” Gramophone Magazine, November 2008

“His dexterity is, of course, dazzling, but it is Aimard's range or timbre and colour that impresses most.” BBC Music Magazine, November 2008 *****

“Pierre-Laurent Aimard knew Messiaen and studied with Yvonne Loriod, yet these personal associations result in playing of intense sobriety.
Indeed, the initial impression, in the first of the early Préludes, is of unusual restraint. While pianists anxious to underline the links with Debussy often opt for impressionistic washes of sound, Aimard achieves insight through clarity, a quality aided by superb sound-recording, with a rich range of meticulously graded dynamic levels, and just the right amount of space and resonance around the instrument.
Aimard's technical virtuosity comes through in the evenness of his voicing and the pearly delicacy with which Messiaen's intricate ornamental writing is projected. Nevertheless, when turbulence and incisiveness are required, as in the Ile de feu studies, they emerge naturally and inevitably.
Aimard never polishes away the rough edges of this music, and one only wishes that the other pair of studies in rhythm had also been included.
Messiaen was at his most ambitious in the grand perspectives of the 13-movement Catalogued'oiseaux, and the two items included here offer a particularly strong contrast. With 'La Bouscarle' – so much more mellifluous a title in French than 'Cetti's Warbler' – diversity is paramount, and although Aimard is characteristically lucid and uncompromising, not least in his timing of the silences near the end, this piece never seems one of the composer's more cogent inspirations. On the other hand, the ravishing alternation of chorales and cadenzas in 'L'Alouette Lulu' ('The Woodlark') is marvellously sustained in this mesmerising account, a miracle of tonal refinement and digital fluency.
It caps a disc that promises to give ever more subtle rewards on repeated hearing.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“[Aimard] plays all eight of the early Preludes (of 1928/9), readily finding Messiaen's special brand of intimate and extrovert impressionism.” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition

“Spellbinding performances from Michel Béroff of such all-engulfing virtuosity and poetic sensitivity that one can only sit in awe and wonder. These two great piano classics have never sounded more luminous, and the recording is first rate.” BBC Music Magazine, January 2006 *****

“Hewitt has few equals in Messiaen. The very early Préludes (Messiaen was studying with Dukas when he wrote them) mightn't seem the ideal repertory in which to demonstrate this, but she plays them with exquisitely controlled colour, clarity and eager love for the music. In this performance they're full of luminous shot and shaded colours that are typical of the mature Messiaen, and in the final virtuoso number she seems even to have discovered an early draft for a theme in the Turangalîla Symphony. Her melodic lines are strong, her sonorities rich, but her loud playing is never noisy or forced. She has that crucial quality needed of a Messiaen pianist: patience. Patience to let a chord register and fade, patience never to pre-empt a climax. In the two Îlede feu pieces she shows that she can produce hardedged sonorities as well as subtle ones. And all her gifts as a Messiaen pianist are evident in 'Le baiser de l'Enfant-Jésus': the tempo is patient, the contemplation rapt, the embellishments delicately precise, with a magical change of colour as the sunlit hortus conclusus at the centre of the movement is reached. The recording is finely sensitive to the exceptional beauty of Hewitt's sound.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Hakon Austbo's third volume of Messiaen's Piano Music offers gorgeous sounds in the composer's early, post-Debussyan set of Preludes, plus the wirier exoticism of the four Rhythmic Studies inspired by Papuan native culture and Canteyodjaya-the title of which comes from Indian Karnatic theory of rhythm. Austbo's expertise ideally captures the verve and sweep of Canteyodjaya in particular.” Classic FM Magazine, April 2000

“…this handsome set from EMI is well worth considering. With works spanning his output, a range of genres and some wonderful performances…” BBC Music Magazine, November 2008 *****

“The 14-CD EMI set is one of the those incredibly useful, disarmingly cheap, EMI completist pull-togethers, this one boasting classic Messiaen moments like Previn's 1977 Turangalîla-Symphonie, Dorati's penetrating 1964 Chronochromie, Rattle's Eclairs sur l'Au-delà, Martha Argerich's and Alexandre Rabinovitch's Visions de l'Amen and Messiaen's own performances of his organ works.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2009

“The 14-CD EMI set is one of those incredibly useful, disarmingly cheap, completist pulltogethers, this one boasting classic Messiaen moments like Previn's 1977 Turangalîla-Symphonie, Dorati's penetrating 1964 Chronochromie, Rattle's Eclairs sur l'Au-delà, Martha Argerich's and Alexandre Rabinovitch's Visions de l'Amen and Messiaen's own performances of his organ works.
For those wanting to look deeper into Messiaen's evolution and history, the Accord set of early recordings featuring Messiaen, Loriod and contemporary acolytes is essential. The set begins with Messiaen's and Loriod's 1962 recording of Visions de l'Amen (their second version; an original 1949 account is lost to hopeless sound) and it's a cunningly paced, keenly nuanced performance where articulation and timbre have been carefully considered. Loriod's 1956 account of the Vingt regards has a thrilling atmosphere of discovery, and the Catalogued'oiseaux she cut in '59 has bravura attack, although her later Erato set is more seasoned.
In the mid-1950s Pierre Boulez's Domain Musical society gave many Messiaen premieres, and Boulez's account of the insanely exacting Sept Haïkaï and a joyous performance of Oiseauxexotiques from Rudolf Albert, recorded at Domaine Musical events, enjoy a marvellous sense of time and place. Messiaen's own recording of the Quartet for the End of Time, featuring cellist Etienne Pasquier (with whom he was interred in Stalag VIII-A), is technically wobbly and shrill by modern standards, but has a rooted emotional authenticity that never tries too hard to make its point. The only low-point is Maurice Le Roux's Turangalîla: an apparently fine performance, but the recording is so lamely transferred it's impossible to tell either way.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“No reservations…about Peter Hill's masterly set of the piano music, longheld in esteem by Messiaen-lovers,. Technical control, characterisation, colour, 'clarté': it's all here. Few if any pianists play the first and last movements of Vingt regards so slowly. Few approached his sense of a majestic mystery.” BBC Music Magazine, November 2008 *****

“Throughout‚ Hill limns Messiaen’s heady‚ quasi pantheistic amalgam of rapture and stillness‚ evocation and exultation with illuminating exuberance…Hill is supported by a recording of satisfyingly huge range…In Benjamin Frith, Hill has a duo partner as responsive to Messiaen’s demands for subtlety of colour and delicacy of texture as he is himself.” Gramophone Magazine