My cultural weekend continues: Jonathan Moyer plays Messiaen’s “Livre du Saint Sacrement”

My weekend musical bonanza continued this afternoon with an outstanding performance of Olivier Messiaen’s “Livre du Saint Sacrement” performed at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland by Jonathan William Moyer, the church’s new organist and music director.  The performance was give in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Messiaen’s birth.  Moyer is a doctoral candidate at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and will be performing the work there next week, so this was the out-of-town try-out on the Covenant’s large Aeolian-Skinner organ.  The organ sounded better than usual today; I noticed a large pile of red upholstered pew cushions in the corner–if they were banished permanently, that’s a good thing for the usually dry acoustics in the church.  Messiaen’s organ music sounds best in a reverberant room.

“Livre du Saint Sacrement” is a daunting work in eighteen movements lasting a bit over two hours.  The composer indicates an optional intermission following the eleventh movement, which Moyer observed.  His performance was clear, cleanly played (if perhaps a bit conservative in tempos at times.)  The organ worked surprising well with Messiaen’s registrational instructions.  The notated birdsongs sang out not just from the chancel organ in the front, but sometimes from the antiphonal organ in the back of the church.

There was an unfortunately small audience—I’m guessing mostly Church of the Covenant members.  Several whom I spoke to indicated that the organist had “coached” them in what to expect, with a lecture and film about Messiaen, and very complete program notes.  (I had the benefit of my own copy of the score to follow, but the notes were also very helpful.)

The Church of the Covenant has made a good choice in their new organist, who must have had a bit of trepidation in following the very popular and brilliantly talented Todd Wilson who was in the position for most of the past twenty years.  But Jonathan Moyer acquitted himself admirably today.

Remembrance of Things Past: Turning Pages for Messiaen

Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen sign autographs at the Cleveland Museum of Art

There are some events that you remember for the rest of your life. One of those occurred for me almost exactly 30 years ago, October 13, 1978, when Olivier Messiaen and his wife Yvonne Loriod played a concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art.  I was living on Long Island at the time, but my friend Bruce Shewitz, who was working in the Musical Arts Department of the museum at the time, asked me if I wanted to come back for the concert.  Not only that, would I be interested in turning pages for the major work on the second half of the program, Messiaen’s “Visions de l’Amen” for two pianos, which Messiaen and Loriod would perform together.  Loriod played Debussy and solo Messiaen (excerpts from “Vingt regards”) on the first half.

Bruce turned for Loriod; I turned for Messiaen.  We met briefly prior to the beginning of the concert, Messiaen showed me his tattered score of “Visions.”  He did not speak English, and my French was rudimentary at best.  But he was cordial.

The performance went off without a hitch, despite my terror of making a mistake.  I confess that during the last movement I became lost in the very repetitive music, but the composer carried on. (It was a work that I had heard before, but I had never seen the score before.)  About midway through the performance of the 45-minute work, I looked down at the piano keyboard and saw smudges on the keys which I almost immediately determined to be blood.  Messiaen had cut himself on the keyboard while he was playing.  But he didn’t miss a note.

After the concert, we were in the green room behind the stage, and the composer disappeared.  Karel Paukert, Curator of Music and host of the event, went looking for Messiaen and found him, with a damp paper towel, back out on the stage cleaning the blood off the piano keys.  Messiaen’s comment was, “It’s a good thing my wife didn’t see it, because she would have stopped the performance.”  Lucky for all of us.

After the backstage congratulations and greetings (and clean-up), Messiaen and Loriod spent time in the museum lobby signing autographs.  He signed my program, “with thanks to the page turner.”  There were pictures taken, which you see above.  The Messiaens are seated with their backs to the camera.  I am at the far right, with the light-colored suit (and considerably more hair than I have today).  Bruce is to my left.  Karel Paukert is kneeling in front of Loriod and in the center is Paukert’s (now former) wife Noriko.  The only other person I recognize in the picture is (I think) the organ builder Charles Ruggles (with the bald head and beard.)

It seems hard to believe that this was thirty years ago, for Messiaen’s 70th birthday tribute.  This year we celebrate his 100th anniversary.  On November 2nd, I’ll be playing a recital at my church (Euclid Avenue Congregational Church in Cleveland) including three of Messiaen’s more austere organ works in his memory and honor: Apparition de l’Église Éternelle, Monodie, and Chants d’oiseaux (from Livre d’Orgue).

Film: Apparition of the Eternal Church

One of the most striking and haunting bits of the recent national AGO convention was a screening of the film Apparition of the Eternal Church by filmmaker Paul Festa.  A couple of months ago I had stumbled on the trailer for the film on youtube.  The description on his web site says it best:

In Apparition of the Eternal Church, 31 people listen to a ten-minute piece of music through headphones and describe what they hear. What all but a few don’t know is that the music is Olivier Messiaen’s monumental organ work Apparition of the Eternal Church, which the composer wrote in 1931 when he was 24 years old. A devout Catholic and the organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris, Messiaen wrote a piece that sends some listeners to the heights of spiritual and erotic ecstasy.  For others, the encounter with Messiaen is like ten minutes in Dante’s inferno. The experiment, then, is to have 31 people put the violent contradictions of Messiaen’s music into words. The result is a collective interpretation improvising its way through an aesthetic landscape defined by paradox. Resolution confronts eternity, eroticism asceticism, spiritual ecstasy physical torture. Together, the music and its interpreters conjure something like what William Blake famously called the marriage of heaven and hell.

The cast of listeners contains people of all sorts: scholar and critic Harold Bloom, film maker John Cameron Mitchell, musician Albert Fuller, Justin Bond (better known as “Kiki” of Kiki and Herb), composer (and Messiaen student) Richard Felciano, and many others unknown to the general public.

I had despaired of ever seeing it here in Cleveland, so I was thrilled when I saw it on the program for the convention.  It came at the end of a very long day at the end of a very long evening of chamber music by Messiaen.  The concert ended with what seemed like an interminable work for six Ondes Martenot, the strange electronic keyboard instrument that fascinated Messiaen for most of his career.  I browbeat my traveling companion into staying for the film, and he was glad that he did.

Festa’s film is very funny in places, but by the end it is ultimately quite haunting. You can get an idea about it from the trailer.  I spoke with Paul Festa later in the week at the convention and gave him some contacts that he might pursue to get it shown in Cleveland.  (Cleveland Cinematheque and the Cleveland Museum of Art film series seem like naturals, especially in this 100th birthday anniversary year for Messiaen.)  If you get a chance, don’t miss the film, even if you don’t like Messiaen’s music.

Messiaen’s Muse

“Messiaen” (Peter Hill, Nigel Simeone)

I have recently been reading Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone’s splendid new biography of French composer/organist Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). Messiaen wrote voluminously about his own music, and his works have been dissected in any number of other books, but he was stubbornly private about his own life and there is no previous biography of Messiaen that discusses the details of his personal life, especially the tragic mental decline of his first wife, Claire Delbos, also a talented composer and performer, who slid into a kind of Alzheimer’s-like stupor and was institutionalized for years before her death. Peter Hill is a respected pianist and notable exponent of Messiaen’s piano works. The authors have had full access to Messiaen’s diaries, notebooks and calendars, thanks to his widow, the pianist Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, who was also Messiaen’s muse and most brilliant performer. She assisted in the preparation of the materials for this book. In twentieth-century music, perhaps only the personal and professional partnership of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears comes close to matching that of Messiaen and Loriod.

The real heroine of this story is Yvonne Loriod (b.1924) who has devoted her entire life to performing Messiaen’s works, copying scores and parts, taking care of Messiaen (including driving him around in a car that she bought herself, cooking and cleaning his house long before they married in 1961, several years after Messiaen’s first wife died). Loriod became Messiaen’s pupil at the age of 18 and quickly became indispensable. She is deserving of her own book-length biography. Her performances (which continued into her 70s) were legendary; for example, performing twenty-two Mozart concertos in a period of one week; giving the first performance of Pierre Boulez’s second piano sonata (It has been said that the score was so difficult and dense and even Loriod—no slouch with modern music—broke into tears when she saw it.); performing Messaien’s three-hour Catalogue d’oiseaux from memory with one interval. Loriod’s piano students include Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is the leading interpreter of Messiaen and Boulez of this generation.

The Hill/Simeone book is full of never-before-published photos of Messiaen and Loriod, their friends and associates, and illustrations of Messiaen’s manuscripts and notebooks. (Especially interesting are the cahiers in which Messiaen notated on manuscript paper birdsongs out in the field.) This volume stands to be the standard biography of Messiaen for the foreseeable future.

Technorati Tags: Olivier Messiaen, Yvonne Loriod

Messiaen’s Turangalila, version 2005

This was quite a memorable weekend of music in Cleveland. (At the same time the Cleveland Indians were losing their chance for the 2005 playoffs.)

Last night (Saturday, October 1), I went to the Cleveland Orchestra concert, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. The first part of the program was Stravinksy’s very late Requiem Canticle with a chamber choir from the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. This piece was written during Stravinksy’s “serial phase” in which he swiped some of the concepts of his arch-aesthetic-enemy Arnold Schoenberg and his 2nd Viennese School buddies Berg and Webern. Requiem Canticles is unmistakably Stravinsky, but second-rate Stravinsky, as if he had run out of things to say. I’m assuming that the Cleveland performance was creditable; but it’s not a piece I’m going to run out and buy a recording of, or have a longing to hear again.

The second part of the program was Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie (calling it the second “half” would be incorrect–the Stravinsky lasted less than 15 minutes; the Messiaen, 75). The soloists were the same as a couple of years ago: Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, and Cynthia Millar, ondes-Martenot (that strange electronic keyboard instrument so favored by Messiaen).

This was an absolutely thrilling performance of Turangalila, especially Aimard’s playing, which was alternately tender and caressing and steely. He played from memory (a feat in itself), and was in constant visual communication with Welser-M??st. Aimard is a genius. Several prominent local musicians were gathered in the Severance Hall balcony after the performance exclaiming in unison about Aimard. Franz’s interpretation has matured since the last Cleveland Orchestra performances of this ten movement behemoth. The whole affair seemed less like it was going to run away without him than it had the last time.

At the end there was an ovation–spontaneous, with people on their feet shouting–not one of those timid affairs that are so common these days at Severance Hall where people would give a standing ovation to a slab of beef being drug across the stage. This was a performance worthy of its standing ovation, and multiple curtain calls for the conductor and soloists.