Olivier Messiaen: Des canyons aux étoiles

quote:

However the star of the evening was NOT Mackerras. The middle concert (and, of which more later, in a poor piece of programming) was Messiaen's Des Canyons aux Etoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars). And how utterly extraordinary it was too. The Netherlands Youth Orchestra were conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw with Benjamin Kobler on the piano and William Pervis on the horn.

The work paints a portrait of various American national parks (and the wildlife, especially the birdlife within), expecially the canyons and the stars above. It also has a strong spiritual dimension (like much of his writing). It's really difficult to describe it without reciting the programme note in full (which I'm not about to do). However, it was a profound experience and one of the finest things I've heard this year (I may start a thread on it soon, in order to ask for help picking out a recording).

The playing was wonderful (and I was very glad I've recently been exploring his catalogue of bird music for solo piano). There is a slow movement for solo horn, meant to represent outer space (titled 'interstellar call'). The way he mixes the brilliance and beauty with the emptyness is staggering and, to my ears, puts Holst's attempts to show this into the shade.

There is some wonderfully clever orchestration (indeed, the strings are very sparse and percussion in some regards steals the show) - some of the wind effects were extraordinary. However, unlike the Strauss from the Budapest orchestra the other evening (where you felt it was very nearly scored for everything up to and including kitchen sink), here there was a clarity to the writing - he blended his instruments masterfully and it never felt like too much.

At an hour and a half it's long (and too much for some, who left), but most seemed to know what they were letting themselves in for and were as impressed as we were (not least by the wonderful playing of the young musicians).

However, it's the kind of work where at the end you almost feel you never want to hear another note of anything, and certainly not the Bruckner 7 due to start in half an hour. In this regard it was poor programming and not really suitable to fill the space between Beethoven and Bruckner - would that it had been given an evening to itself.