Messiaen: Des canyons aux étoiles… (CD Review)

 by Karl Nehring

Messiaen: Des canyons aux étoiles… Jason Hardink, piano; Stefan Dohr, piano; Keith Carrick, xylorimba; Eric Hopkins, glockenspiel; Utah Symphony; Thierry Fischer, music director. Hyperion CDA68316

 

Sometimes it is fun to listen to something that seems a bit crazy. Something out of the ordinary, wildly imaginative, bold and brash and a bearing boatload of excitement. For those times, crank up your stereo system and give a listen to this new release of Des canyons aux étoiles… (“from the canyons to the stars…”) by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1929). He wrote the piece as the result of a commission from Alice Tully, who requested that Messiaen compose an orchestral work honoring the USA’s Bicentennial celebration of 1976. The CD booklet recounts that upon receiving the commission, Messiaen “consulted an encyclopedia in search of  a suitable subject. What he found was the canyon territory of southern Utah. In the spring of 1973  he paid the region a visit – as the Utah Symphony would do fifty years later, to give a performance of the work in the canyons and under the stars, a performance to which this studio recording relates. Messiaen, when he was there, noted down not only bird songs, as was his custom, but also rock colours: ‘All possible varieties of red, orange and violet, these astonishing forms caused by erosion.’ The birds and rocks, the songs and the colours would guide his imagination through what became a concert-length work for an orchestra full of woodwind, brass, and percussion sections with a modest complement of just thirteen strings and a solo piano.” 

You can begin to get a sense of what Messiaen is up to in this piece by taking a look at the titles he gave to each of its sections. These sections are organized in to three main parts, and on this recording, Parts I and II appear on CD 1 (47:06), while Part III fills up CD 2 (45:12). An examination of the titles of each of the dozen sections offers an insight into the creative imagination of the composer as well as hints at the variety of the musical sounds to be found in then score. Part 1: Le Désert ("The desert"); Les orioles ("The orioles"); Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles ("What is written in the stars"); Le Cossyphe d'Heuglin ("The white-browed robin-chat"); Cedar Breaks et le don de crainte ("Cedar Breaks and the gift of awe"); Part 2: Appel interstellaire ("Interstellar call"); Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange("Bryce Canyon and the red-orange rocks"); Part 3: Les Ressuscités et le chant de l'étoile Aldebaran ("The resurrected and the song of the star Aldebaran"); Le Moqueur polyglotte ("The mockingbird"); La Grive des bois ("The wood thrush"); Omao, leiothrix, elepaio, shama ("ʻōmaʻo, leiothrix, ʻelepaio, shama"); Zion Park et la cité céleste ("Zion Park and the celestial city"). (For those who might understandably might be wondering, ʻōmaʻo etc. are bird species.)  The opening notes from the horn set the tone – for the duration of the 90 minutes, much of the music involves a solo instrument or small groups of instruments, with two of the movements (Le Cossyphe d'Heuglin  and Le Moqueur polyglotte) being for solo piano. Along the way, there is a solo passages for wind machine; a part for an instrument that Messiaen invented, the geophone (a large flat drum filled with lead beads that can be rotated to sound like shifting sand); and as the liner notes explain about a puzzling sound, “a weird glissando played on the mouthpiece of a trumpet.”

Some of the sonorities may be unfamiliar, but at the same time there are the unmistakable sounds of nature, such as wind and birds. Messiaen does not attempt to portray the grandeur of nature by writing music for huge forces; instead, he focuses on small details – birds, sounds, colors, rock formations in a canyon – and attempts to communicate the wonders he encounters through music by means of specific orchestral instruments or combinations thereof. Granted, this might all sound a bit crazy, but as I asserted at the beginning of this review, sometimes it can be fun to listen to something a bit crazy, especially when that something is crazily colorful and imaginative musical composition presented in a carefully crafted performance that has been convincingly captured by the engineering team. Although this may not be a release that will appeal to everyone, but for Messiaen fans and those with an inclination for musical exploration, this new release from Hyperion is well worth an audition.