Birthday tweet
Treated daughter to Messiaen for her birthday. Others go bowling and drink coke. We drive to Cambridge, hear Visions de l'Amen in Kings chapel, eat vegetarian supper in Rainbow Cafe, attend compline at nearly midnight and drive home to a new disc, L'amour et la foi - vocal music by Olivier Messiaen - on the car stereo. Well it is Holy Week. The performers are the Danish National Vocal Ensemble, Concert Choir and Chamber Orchestra conducted by Marcus Creed, a graduate incidentally of Kings Cambridge. They achieve the excellence which the composer says is necessary to perform these works. The voices sound reared on Messiaen's intervals. In O Sacrum Convivium, the chords linger, their lengths seemingly indeterminate, governed only partly by the solemn inflections of priestly speech. The consonants of Cinq rechants provide the percussion with the voices swooping and whooping with the ingenuity not expected of a Roman Catholic church organist. The composer has the appeal of the unexpected. The orchestra including piano and ondes martenot colours the background of the Trois petites liturgies de la Presence divine. Birdsong is never far away. Messiaen arrived at the expressive tweet years before its time.
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