Customer Reviews

Olivier Messiaen: Concert à Quatre

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This Deutsche Grammophon CD is noteworthy for featuring the world-premiere recording of Olivier Messiaen's final work, and it's filled out by some early and relatively unknown works. Myung-Whun Chung conducts the Orchestre de l'Opera Bastille.

The "Concert a quatre" for piano, cello, oboe and flute wasn't actually the last thing that Messiaen worked on. After completing two movements, he set it aside when he took on the commission for his massive "Eclairs sur l'au-dela". However, this Quadruple Concert was completed after his death by his widow Yvonne Loriod together with the composers George Benjamin and Heinz Holliger. They orchestrated the second half of the second movement, while apparently they wrote the entire fourth movement on the basis of Messiaen's plans, using scraps from earlier works to do so. Loriod and Holliger perform on piano and oboe, with Mstislav Rostrpovich and Catherine Cantin on cello and flute respectively.

If you're familiar with Messiaen's career, then you probably know what to expect here: the utterly gratuitous use of birdsong just like nearly every other work from his last four decades, but without the epic vision of the best of these. Messiaen had some inspiration from the Classical era in writing this piece, namely the example of Mozart, which results in a curious restraint. Ultimately it's a very lightweight piece.

Completing and recording this concerto certainly seemed worthwhile in the immediate aftermath of Messiaen's death, when his pupils wished to pay a tribute to the dead master and audiences could be attracted by a "last work". However, almost no interest has been shown in this concerto since, even as other Messiaen is recorded repeatedly, so that ought to tell you how insignificant it is.

"Un sourire" for orchestra (1989) is another generally forgettable late work, 10 minutes of birdsong and nothing else, though the last minute or so is eerie.

The remaining two pieces come from a very different composer, a young student of his French forebears who wouldn't yet discover birdsong for decades. "Les offrandes oubliees" (1930) and "Le tombeau replendissant" (1931) are among Messiaen's earliest pieces, and while the example of Debussy can be heard occasionally, there's considerable violence that surely didn't come from that "impressionist" composer, and there's already Messiaen's original long, drawn-out lines like some vision of heavenly peace. These two early works are juvenalia, but they are nonetheless more meaty and entertaining than the elderly composer.

All in all I'd recommend this disc only to Messiaen completists. The pieces are minor, plus I've never really cared for Myung-Whun Chung's Messiaen interpretations, which tend to be flimsy and nebulous.

This is Messiaen's last work and without doubt, one of my favorite. The recording couldn't be better since the concert was dedicated to all of those who play.