Cycles of Messiaen’s organ works aren’t quite as much
like buses as this double review would imply. True, we’ve been waiting
ages for another one, especially one from Olivier Latry, but of the
two that have turned up at once we’ve had the chance to get to know
one already, for the Regis box is a repackaging of Bate’s pioneering
cycle for Unicorn-Kanchana. All the same, only those who already have
Bate’s complete cycle on CD can pass over this re-release, for it is
offered at the price of two Unicorn-Kanchana discs (say, containing
Livre du Saint Sacrement) and includes both Messiaen’s and Felix
Aprahamian’s well-worn notes. Those who are familiar with the music
are likely to be familiar with these too, so ubiquitous were they at
one stage for lack of competition, but Aprahamian’s plain-spoken erudition
and Messiaen’s curious prose, which manages to be at the same time brusquely
descriptive and evocatively colourful, are certainly worth re-reading.
While Paul Griffiths’s notes for the DG box are new, their lamentable
brevity means any one movement is lucky to get a sentence to itself.
As for so much else about the man and his music, Faber’s ‘Messiaen Companion’,
edited by Peter Hill, is simply invaluable for going behind the notes
and while some of Gillian Weir’s judgements on the aesthetic quality
of individual works are at least questionable (Livre d’Orgue
comes in for a bit of a pasting) her immense practical experience of
the works and insightful, musicianly writing ensures that you come away
much the wiser about what remains an extraordinarily varied corpus.
I’ll pre-empt anyone looking for a quick either-or
recommendation: both sets are outstandingly well played. Both also deal
with Messiaen’s different musical languages, periods and styles with
sensitivity and imagination. If you think a string quartet has to travel
a long way from the darting brilliance of Beethoven’s op.18 set to the
otherworldly sound and fury of op.135, how much further Bate and Latry
have to extend their sympathies and technique here. Messiaen’s earliest
published work, Le Banquet Céleste (1932), is a classic
of simple mysticism, slow-moving chords with the radiance shining from
added sixths and sharp-saturated key signatures; Livre d’Orgue
(1951) charts territory that sounds defiantly modernist even today with
its concluding Soixante-Quatre Durées, an infamous masterpiece
of rhythmic serialism; the apparently compendious nature of Livre
du Saint Sacrement (1984) hides what can still be identified as
a distinctive ‘late’ Messiaen style. The analogy also holds good for
the tripartite bundling of the cycles – op.95 and the Verset pour
la Fête de la Dédicace (1960) blur the boundaries slightly,
but the merits of and differences between Bate’s and Latry’s approaches
to the cycle are most evident when considering it in three chunks.
As the cycle most often played by organists who don’t
venture further into Messiaen’s music, La Nativité du Seigneur
(1935) receives performances that in both cases reveal the difference
between knowing a piece of music and knowing the composer who wrote
it (Simon Preston’s Argo recording used to be touted as definitive but
the passage of time now makes it seem little more than flashy). Bate
chooses consistently faster tempos that reveal the kinship between Messiaen’s
early style and other, more conservative giants of French organ writing;
Widor, Tournemire, Dupré. In this her approach is more similar
to other organists than Latry’s, whose interpretation consistently stresses
that although Messiaen’s music emerges from this world, its composer
was already possessed of a quite different pair of ears. The Indian
rhythms of the cycle’s still centre, La Verbe, meander more meditatively,
though no less precisely, in Latry’s hands. Dieu parmi nous closes
the cycle with an epic grandeur that to some ears will sound a mite
stolid after Bate’s more dramatic course. Sometimes you may choose to
hear the piece as a brilliant toccata firmly within the French tradition;
at others you may want to sense its reaching towards a more mystical,
modern way of translating religious sensibility into music. I can only
suggest you hear both.
If my taste inclines towards Latry in Nativité,
it swings to Bate in Les Corps Glorieux ((1939), principally
for her smoother narrative flow and surer handling of that work’s pivotal
movement, Combat de la Mort et de la Vie. As in La Verbe,
a fast, minatory opening section builds up tension, which is then cut
short and slowly dissipated by a long, luminous meditation. Latry’s
grandeur spills over into grandiosity as his leisurely tempo loses the
work’s pulse. This seems pretty crucial to me if for no other reason
than that its composer was so fanatical about a feeling for rhythm,
to be observed both in his works and his coaching of performers. His
own tempo for La Verbe is almost as slow as Latry’s, but the
pulse never disappears. Bate refuses to succumb to the meditation’s
possibilities for somnolence and the result seems to move and yet stand
still in just the right way. Likewise, the long phrases of ‘Prière
du Christ montant à son Père’ which concludes l’Ascension
(1933/4) must convey the sense of Christ, as it were, rising rather
than hovering tantalisingly in mid-air. Both Latry and (unexpectedly)
Boulez (in the work’s orchestral version) misjudge this while Bate’s
purposeful phrases spin effortlessly towards their inevitably serene
conclusion. (If you want to hear Christ not so much rising as zooming
towards his father, try Stokowski on Cala. Shockingly ardent: Messiaen
was reportedly and unsurprisingly disapproving).
Apparition de l’Eglise Eternelle (1932) has
the pulse written into the fabric of the movement, and with its ‘Très
lent’ indication this startling answer to Debussy’s La Cathédrale
Engloutie holds less possibility for getting it ‘wrong’. Bate and
Latry both grade the crescendo nicely and (more difficult) return to
the work’s original, gloomy piano at the end without too many clunky
registral changes. I happen to prefer Gillian Weir’s more legato phrasing
at the work’s C major midpoint; Latry is quite choppy here and whatever
Bate did is rounded away by the cavernous Beauvais acoustic.
In many ways, this is the nub of the matter. I could
compare individual movements until my keyboard cried for mercy, but
the very instrument used and the acoustic surrounding it do, in this
case, play a huge part in deciding preferences, especially when the
playing is so confident and (largely) accurate in both cases. Bate’s
Beauvais recordings were well known, when they originally appeared,
for their huge resonance and dynamic range (my LP player wasn’t having
any of Bate’s Dieu parmi nous, scored deeply into the vinyl,
and let me know this with hideous skippings and scrapings) and while
this redounded greatly to the recording producer Bob Auger’s credit,
I found myself wondering just how many notes I could discern amid the
Danien-Gonzalez clamour. CD remastering has improved matters, but I
still find listening to stretches of fast music on the Bate set frustrating
because of the lack of clarity. Les yeux dans les roues from
Livre d’Orgue is another toccata form but a world away from the
splendour of its formal forebears. The page is black with notes, and
the Isaiah quotation which precedes it makes clear that the piece should
engender a sense of breathless terror. Bate fails in this, not through
lack of virtuosity but simply because you can’t make out what’s going
on. The contrast with Latry couldn’t be clearer, especially as their
tempos are identical (the extra three seconds on Bate’s recording can
be attributed to the echo!). DG’s recording team in Notre Dame used
an unprecedented twelve microphones and must have spent an inordinate
length of time at the mixing desks, but their efforts have produced
a true sonic spectacular, full of depth and delicacy. It bears only
a resemblance to the Cavaillé-Coll instrument you hear when visiting
Notre Dame, as there is no place in the building from which you can
hear all the ranks with the transparency achieved here, but it reveals
the harmonic and rhythmic complexities of Messiaen’s music to a degree
only previously realised by the Collins’ engineers for Gillian Weir.
That was on a very different instrument (a Frobenius) in a very different
and much less resonant acoustic (Arhus cathedral) which gives much more
‘help’ to the engineers while reducing the perfume available to performers.
The Danien-Gonzalez in Beauvais naturally has more of that French perfume
(heart-melting voix célestes in the Prière après
la Communion from Livre du Saint-Sacrament) as well as a
pedal bassoon of impressive strength and quick response: the low Cs
which form the firmament of Apparition’s climax are just as clear
for Bate as they are for Latry, though one senses that the DG engineers
have done some tweaking to make it so.
The agility of the instrument’s response to the player
becomes even more vital in the middle-period works, when page after
page of abrupt registral changes and lightning-quick birdsong demand
fabulous virtuosity from both. Messe de la Pentecôte and
Livre d’Orgue form with the orchestral Chronochromie a
triptych of works central to Messiaen’s life, chronologically and musically.
They are his boldest and most imposing, containing few points of repose
or hooks on which an unfamiliar listener may hang an ear. By that same
token they also offer richer rewards to the adventurous listener than
almost anything else in Messiaen. The premiere of Livre d’Orgue
almost didn’t happen, so great was the crush of people trying to squeeze
into the church in Stuttgart where Pierre Boulez had organised the concert.
Messiaen was unable to enter the church himself and had to find a side-door:
I wonder if the cycle will see similar enthusiasm ever again? Though
Latry and Bate take roughly the same time over both the Messe
and the Livre, I frequently found that Bate felt quicker because
she doesn’t articulate as clearly as Latry. Sometimes, as in the
Pièces en Trio of the Livre, it’s a matter of taking
the bizarre leaps and note values and apparent disjunction's at face
value and playing them absolutely straight, as Latry does. Sometimes,
as in the Tongues of Fire introit in the Messe, it’s a matter
of choosing varied enough registration that will make the different
lines stand out from each other (Thomas Trotter is particularly successful
at this in the Messe, helped by a forward Decca recording at the Cavaillé-Coll
of St Pierre de Douai). Like Soixante-quatre Durées which
ends the Livre, the short Verset pour la Fete de la Dédicace
may never yield up its enigmas to me; I simply enjoy the noises it makes,
and I enjoy Latry’s noises more than any other version, because he seems
to trust Messiaen the most.
The pendulum that has been swinging in terms of the
two players’ approach to the oeuvre is now past the midpoint, and it
is Bate who consistently takes more time in the two ‘late’ cycles, Méditations
sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité (1969) and
Livre du Saint Sacrement. The Meditations feature (or seem
to) more birdsong than any other work (four of the nine movements end
with the plaintive song of the yellowhammer) and I find Latry more consistently
effective at giving wing (sorry) to what look on the page like endless
streams of unpredictable note clusters and phrasing them in a realistically
avian way. Notre Dame also offers more colours on the manual stops with
which he can distinguish the many different species featured. Bate scores
in the work’s sections of Gregorian chant, like the opening of no.2,
Dieu est Saint, where a spacious tempo feels essential for creating
the right sense of majesty: if I were singing the chants at the speeds
Latry sets I’d feel rushed, and he sometimes sounds as if he is embarrassed
by their inclusion. However Latry is far more relaxed (3’55" to
Bate’s 2’38") in no.3, La Relation réele en Dieu est
réellement identique a l’essence, which enables him to unravel
the convoluted three-voice counterpoint as though nothing could be easier
to play or to listen to.
Bate gave the premiere of Livre du Saint Sacrement
(the only organ work for which the composer did not do this for himself)
and her subsequent recording, the work’s first, lasts almost 130 minutes.
Hans-Ola Ericsson was also coached extensively by Messiaen in this work
and his two recordings (on Jade and BIS) take around two hours, suggesting
that he preferred spacious performances. Latry takes a little over 100
and rarely feels rushed and most performers in the last ten years have
agreed with him (Gillian Weir, Stephen Cleobury and Anne Page among
others). In these last two mighty cycles Messiaen adds to his compositional
armoury the technique of a langage communicable, whereby theological
concepts (and sometimes whole tracts of Aquinas) are literally spelt
out in the music using a system of notation. Important words like Dieu
are assigned their own phrase; all the letters of the alphabet are given
a pitch, duration, dynamic and registration. To say that this results
in composing by numbers would be grossly simplistic, but I think there
are legitimate concerns about the way that the composer used various
techniques or ‘found’ musical objects (the langage communicable,
birdsong, indian rhythms, plainsong) to, as it were, do a lot of the
creative work for him. Messiaen himself talked of the Livre du Saint
Sacrement as a summation of the experience he had gained from improvising
every Sunday at the Eglise de la Saint-Trinité where he was organist
for over 60 years until shortly before his death. This sense of taking
what was appropriate (the Gospel for the day, a bird he had recently
heard) and bending it to his uses with a carefully honed musical language
is a skill in itself, but it becomes more and more apparent in the works
he wrote after the completion of the monumental Saint François
d’Assise in 1982. He worried he would never compose again – and
yet the two hours of Livre were put together in a matter of months.
Whether Messiaen approved or not, the large-scale set
pieces which form the pillars of the cycle have a narrative that is
more evident in Latry’s (and Weir’s) recording. Even the obviously meditative
movements like Institution de la Eucharistie don’t need the time
that Bate lavishes upon them, though hers is a beautiful achievement
in its own right and benefits enormously from being recorded not in
Beauvais but in Saint-Trinité itself. Bate certainly makes something
gloriously imposing of the sequence of rainbow coloured chords which
flash across the keyboard in La Resurrection, but Latry discovers a
more impetuous joy with shorter phrase lengths.
If a further reason were needed to recommend Latry
above Bate, and indeed above the rest of the competition, it can be
found in his inclusion of two pieces only recently published and previously
unheard since their composition in the early 30s; and the Monodie
of 1963. None of these short works says anything not expressed elsewhere,
but the Offrande au Saint Sacrement is attractive and would make
a convenient standby for an organist when leafing through the library
for communion music. Newcomers to this body of music may fight shy of
committing themselves to the outlay required for Latry, and they will
gain many hours of pleasure and unfailingly sensitive playing from Jennifer
Bate. Those who invest in Olivier Latry’s set will gain all that plus
the thrill of the vivid recording and his dramatic instincts. This sets
the standard.
Peter Quantrill
Olivier Latry 