Olivier MESSIAEN (1908-1992)
Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité (1969)
Tom Winpenny (organ)
rec. 2018, Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavík, Iceland
NAXOS 8.573979 [73:47]
I am not normally a fan of organ music, but I make an exception for the French repertoire and in particular for the work of Messiaen. He seems to me to make the most of what the organ is good at, such as long-held complex chords, thrilling displays of finger dexterity and deep booming basses. Although he was also a pianist, he understood that the organ and the piano, though both keyboard instruments, have very different characters – notes on the piano notes start dying away immediately, for example, and attacks can be much sharper than on the organ – and he allows for this. Add the fact that he was a devout Roman Catholic, and spent many years as the organist for the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, continuing to play Sunday by Sunday regardless of his increasing fame as a composer.
He wrote only one work of liturgical music, the motet O sacrum convivium (an early Mass is lost) but composed plentifully for the organ. The Méditations we have here are one of his later works, written after a long gap in his organ music following the 1951 Livre d’orgue. In the intervening years, his church’s organ was rebuilt and new stops added. On completion in 1967 at an occasion called Le Mystère de Dieu, Messiaen improvised alternately with homilies given by a preacher. These improvisations became the basis of the Méditations.
There are nine movements, ranging from under three minutes to over ten. The subjects are all theological, though the listener would be challenged to relate the titles to the content of the individual movements. In them, Messiaen deploys the whole range of his musical language, with his scales of limited transposition, complex chords with a particular fondness for added sixths, and frequent evocations of birdsong, always precise and specific. (I am not sure that the non-retrogradable rhythms appear.) There is also an additional feature here, what he called his ‘communicable language’. This was a way of translating letters of the alphabet into pitches and note values, thereby allowing him to turn phrases from the Bible, the liturgy or the works of St. Thomas Aquinas into notes. I have to say that the last thing this technique is is ‘communicable’. One can no more hear it than one can the note rows of serial music. That does not matter: it is a device to help Messiaen write his music, which is as characteristic as ever. It is, perhaps more forthright and determined and less evocative than in the pre-war organ works which made his reputation, but a composer is allowed to develop, and by this stage in his career Messiaen was entitled to write what he felt like. I shall only add that the work is varied and not difficult to listen to.
Tom Winpenny offers a marvellously clear and precise performance, perhaps slightly lacking in mystery, although that may be, as I suggested, a characteristic of the work. This is the fourth disc in his Messiaen series, each of which has used a different instrument (review, review, review). Here it is the mighty 72-stop organ in the Heilgrimskirkja in Iceland, a German-built instrument which has attracted players from all over the world. The recording has been very skilfully made, so that the sound expands into the space with losing definition and turning into mush, as can happen in some over-resonant church acoustics. The helpful sleevenotes give us the full titles of each movement, with sources and translations, and the full registration of the organ.
There are, of course, other recordings of this work, including the one made by Olivier Latry
1n 2000 at Notre Dame de Paris for Deutsche Grammophon. However, that and some others are only available as part of a complete set of Messiaen organ works, so this single issue has its place and will also suit those collecting the series one by one.
Stephen Barber
Previous review: Dan Morgan
