Customer Reviews

Hommage a Messiaen: 8 Preludes; Selection from: Quatre Etudes de rythme

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With the centenary of his birth approaching in December 2008, there has been a lot of work by Messiaen performed recently. I know it makes me an apostate to say this, but I remain reserved about the greatness of this composer, finding some of his Catholic mysticism unctuous at best. I cannot contest the fact, however, that some of Messiaen's works for piano are really remarkable, and when performed by the astonishing French pianist Pierre Laurent Aimard, become completely compelling. The early 8 Preludes included here sound like music that Debussy might have composed if he'd lived 15 years longer: moody, complex, and gorgeously colored. While I sometimes grow weary of Messiaen's bird imitations, the two excerpts from the Catalogue d'oiseaux included here come off smashingly. So regardless of how you might feel about Messiaen, I recommend this album for the amazing pianism of M. Aimard. He might yet make a convert of me.

With the extended Product Description, which is the actual text of the package booklet, and Jeff Abell's fine review, I find little to add, and in the main I am in agreement with Abell regarding Messiaen as a composer and with this particular recording. Perhaps translating the poetic French titles of the Preludes may help the reader: The Dove; Song of Ecstasy in a Sad Landscape; The Light Number; Dead Instants; The Impalable Sounds of the Dream; Bells of Anguish and Tears of Farewell; Calm Plaint; and A Reflection in the Wind. These works certainly are cast with the melancholy of Messiaen's grief, but they are wonderously complex, moody, and interesting with their dissonant chords and eventual resolution. Indeed, in relief, two picturesque, bird-inspired works (Cetti's warbler and the wood lark) follow, somewhat lightening the mood with humor, though I find their length taxing. The two studies of Isle of Fire are a radical break, with their powerful beat, runs, and crashing of notes. The engineering of the album is excellent, with just enough audio bounce to give depth and clarity to the piano. Finally, the performance of Pierre-Laurent Aimard is sensitive and, when need be, strong. I give ***** for his interpretation. This is a diverse program of mid 20th-century classical invention that deserves repeated listening.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-992) was an interesting bird. In his early to mid-twenties, he wrote music that sounded late-impressionist, but he ended up modern as hell: modern harmonics, rhythms, neo-primitivism a la Stravinsky -you name it. He's best known as a Catholic and a mystic who wrote music that sounded like a very modern French Scriabin. Through all his experimenting, he wrote music that was both interesting and highly listenable, even lyrical, though the technical demands he imposed on musicians were often gymnastic. He's best known for Quatuor pour le fin du temps the quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet he wrote while in a POW camp after the fall of France to the Germans in 1940. Homage is only the second album of Messiaen's music I have owned or listened to and I love it. I have a fondness for piano music any way and I wanted to see where Messiaen's modern pieces fit in the rich continuum of nineteenth and twentieth century) French piano music -Saint-Saens and Faure, Ravel and Debussy, Satie, Poulenc. I recently bought a magnificent album of solo piano pieces by Poulenc, Piano Works, performed by pianist Pascal Roge, which was originally issued to critical praise in 1988 and reissued in 2004 by Decca - a must buy. How would Messiaen stand up compared to this fine album? The answer is simple: very well. Aimard is a sensitive pianist who has listened to Messiaen for all his life and has used the occasion of the centenary of Messiaen's birth to issue this appealing and challenging collection of short pieces for solo piano. All of the music on this disc is first rate but, another virtue, it is also varied in approach and inspiration. The first eight preludes were written in 1928-9 by a very young composer -twenty at the time-- shortly after the death of his mother, the poet Cecile Sauvage. He described them as a "collection of successive states of mind and personal feelings." Though indisputably modern in attention to chromatics, for instance, they do credit to the composer's ancestors, and particularly to Debussy. They're lyrical and sunnily optimistic in their impact on the listener. The next two pieces are the most interesting in the album, from his Catalogue d'oisseaux (1950). In the late 40s, Messiaen, fascinated by wild bird calls, had transcribed them to use as the basis for a series of compositions which melded modern harmonies and rhythms with the melodic content of the birds' calls. The result is fascinating: the pieces deploy neo-primitive rhythms a la Stravinsky alloyed to heavy block chords and subtle disharmonies, all grouped around fragments of bird calls transcribed from the little creatures' beaks to a concert grand piano. The first piece, and the grandest and most complex, is "La Bouscarle," named after a species of warbler, and the second is "L'Alouette Lulu." They are wonderful listening, both of them! The last two pieces on this wonderful album are experiments in rhythm, from 1950, and strongly influenced by neo-=primitivism, and specifically Stravinsky's Rites of Spring -both feature heavy, chunky chords and displaced rhythms. If these two pieces were longer, they might wear on me, but they're not -one is two minutes, the second four--and they make a satisfying close to a first rate album, which combines three quite different approaches to music that all fit together and show the organic growth of a musical pioneer who was always questing. This is exceptional music exceptionally well played.

(At the same time that I got this album, I picked up two first-rate albums of Chopin, played by pianists Evgeny Kissin and Maurizio Pollini. I love the Chopin albums -they're both superb--but of the three albums, I'd pick Aimard's performance of Messiaen, both because of the quality of the performance and music and because it is out of the mainstream and thus not known to most lovers of classical piano. )

There is no pianist today with a better command of the entire range of New Music, from works commissioned yesterday to the giants of the late 20th C. than Pierre-Laurent Aimard. This incisive and insightful reading of eight Messiaen Preludes for piano ranks with his recordings of Satie and the acknowledged definitive reading of Ligeti's Etudes. The selection form Quatre Etudes de rythme leaves me eager to hear M. Aimard record the entire work.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard continues to be at the forefront of pianists who perform the piano works of Olivier Messiaen at practically every recital he offers. In this recording, very appropriately titled 'Hommage a Messiaen' he has recorded the early Préludes written in 1928 and breathing much the same purified air as those of Claude Debussy. Aimard has a particular affinity for these eight preludes -The Dove; Song of Ecstasy in a Sad Landscape; The Light Number; Dead Instants; The Impalpable Sounds of the Dream; Bells of Anguish and Tears of Farewell; Calm Pliant; A Reflection in the Wind - and manages through his inimitable virtuosity to allow us to enjoy the Impressionistic sounds of these works while emphasizing those aspects of these early works that would lead to Messiaen's later works. There is a restrained sense of melancholy here that makes the Préludes suggest the path toward spiritualism that remained in all the other works of Messiaen,

From these delicate pieces Aimar wisely moves into excerpts from what became and obsession with the composer - the music and the flights of birds. From the 'Catalogue of the Birds' Aimard offers 'Cetti's Warbler' and 'The Wood Lark': for this listener these works are the most poignant ones on this album. And as though to bring the listener up to date with the changes in complexity of pianistic language, Aimard closes this recital with the 'Four Etudes of Rhythm" the 'Isle of Fire 1 and 2.

This is pianistic artistry at its best form one of the most important artists on the stage today. It is an album of great beauty, flawlessly engineered and recorded. Grady Harp, December 10

It's heartening to see a pianist as intelligent, skilled, informed, insightful and inspired as Pierre-Laurent Aimard receive the wide international acclaim, which he so clearly deserves. "Hommage à Messiaen" follows Mr. Aimard's earlier accomplishment with J.S. Bach's "Art of Fugue", rather naturally, given his penchant to strike a successful balance between the imaginative side of both composers vs. the austere "modernist" structure of these highlights of "absolute music", albeit they lived two centuries apart. And he does so without losing sight of the sheer sonic beauty of their works. To be certain, another great pianist such as Gloria Cheng has convincingly demonstrated that there's ample room for a more "romantic touch" in Modern music, including and especially that of Messiaen, drawing on, say, a tasteful application of rubato, a more nuanced phraseology, and a better defined dynamic contour; and that a knowledge of the way such music was composed ought to inform but never cloud the performer's judgment as to how the music at hand could be best rendered and perceived. In this context, Mr. Aimard has offered an equally convincing - and complementary - case for large-scale analytic approaches to the performance of Modernist compositions, as he consistently shows us that an emphasis on robust formal elements wouldn't necessarily come at the price of pure sonic pleasures; neither would it cost us this music's soul.

This album is highly recommended to anyone interested in 20th Modernist music, and Olivier Messiaen's music, in particular.

Payman Akhlaghi
August 27th, 2011, Los Angeles
© 2011, Payman Akhlaghi. All rights reserved for the author.