"A Messiaen Rarity Pays Homage to Utah’s Topography and Birds"
by Alex Ross
New York Times, August 11, 1994
Reinbert de Leeuw’s inspiring first summer as
director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music reached a
pinnacle on Sunday night with the geological, astronomical and
ornithological splendors of Messiaen’s "Des canyons aux étoiles." This
12-part epic poem for small orchestra is not heard as often as the same
composer’s "Turangalîla Symphony," but it certainly ought to be. I can
think of no other work from the latter half of this century that
affords such an excess of sheer beauty. It leaves its audiences in a
state of exhilaration and touches more than once on the sublime.
"Des
canyons aux étoiles" ("From the Canyons to the Stars") was commissioned
by Alice Tully 20 years ago for the American Bicentennial. Following
his own infallible whimsies, Messiaen chose to pay homage to the
canyons and birds of Utah. Although the state responded gratefully by
naming one of its peaks Mount Messiaen, the work is less a portrait of
a particular landscape than of the richness of the mind contemplating
it. Against the austerity of the canyons, Messiaen unleashed an orgy of
exotic instrumentation: trumpeters play with wa-wa mutes and
mouthpieces alone, the solo pianist draws resonances from silently
depressed clusters, the percussionists wield a sand drum and a very
prominent wind machine.
What surprised many listeners in 1974,
however, was not the complexity of the instrumentation but the lyric
directness of much of the music behind it. Having allied himself with
the postwar avant-garde through the early 1960’s, Messiaen here
completed a return to the grand triadic sonorities of his youth, while
holding in mind the chief rhythmic and harmonic discoveries of the late
40’s. "Canyons" is his supreme synthesis, his most daring leap from raw
experimental materials to the mystical wonderland of his inner world.
"Zion Park," the paradisiacal vision that closes the work, might be the
most beautiful and powerful thing he created.
Sunday’s was not
a perfect performance — even though Mr. de Leeuw’s tempos were slow,
the Fellows of Tanglewood Music Center still had trouble with the
fiendish rhythms, and Peter Serkin’s technically brilliant piano solos
did not resonate as the composer wished — but the score made its
proper impact. There was magic in the mere fact of hearing it in the
new Ozawa Hall, with its back wall open on the summer night. After the
great A-major revelation of "Zion Park," I walked out a few feet and
looked up at the stars; they seemed a silent echo of Messiaen’s final
shimmering chord.
With its huge chaotic vistas and intimate
lyric images side by side, "Canyons" seems to sum up also the musical
world view of Tanglewood’s new director of contemporary music: a man
who has made definitive recordings of such diverse repertory as
Antheil’s manic "Jazz Symphony" and Satie’s glacial "Gymnopedies" (at
the piano, on the Philips label). As director of the Schonberg Ensemble
and other Dutch groups, Mr. de Leeuw pioneered an influential
programming philosophy that mixes composers from early and late in the
20th century, European and American, orderly and anarchic, without
regard to rigid ideological divisions.
His programs, however,
have shown a certain bias toward more imaginative members of the
current European avant-garde. Louis Andriessen’s works dominated the
opening weekend, and Tuesday was given over to Mauricio Kagel, the
master ironist of German musical tradition.
The Argentine-born
Mr. Kagel often threatens to lose himself in abstruse deconstructive
schemes, but his scores are saved by a raw melodic charm and a dire wit
worthy of Karl Kraus. There were wonderful moments in his
"Phantasiestuck" (for flute and piano, with invisible chamber
accompaniment) and Piano Trio (full of errant Romantic chromaticisms,
like Franck gone mad). But the tour de force was ". . . den 24,XII.31"
for baritone and chamber orchestra, a dramatization of comical or
sinister newspaper clippings from the day Mr. Kagel was born. An
awesomely absurd finale reports the ringing of Christmas bells all over
America by electric transmission from Bethlehem. Composers through the
ages have sought to transcribe bell timbres, but until Mr. Kagel no one
thought to combine the usual resonant percussion with a tape of live
church bells and a man shouting "Ding, dong, ding, dong!" onstage.
Next to this neo-Dadaist extravagance, American works in the
festival were strikingly subdued. On Sunday afternoon, Yo-Yo Ma and the
Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa played John Harbison’s Cello
Concerto, a handsomely made and dazzlingly orchestrated three-movement
piece that adds to the impressive roster of new works Mr. Ma has lately
been inspiring, although I felt that the whole was a bit less than the
sum of the parts. (The amazing Mr. Ma returned after intermission for
Strauss’s "Don Quixote." In a single day, with Strauss and Messiaen,
Tanglewood got to hear the two greatest wind-machine works in the
literature.)
And on Monday night there was a concert devoted
mostly to Northeastern composers who draw in different ways on the inexhaustible
legacy in the Second Viennese School. Namely: Elliott Carter’s Quintet
for Piano and Winds, a 1991 work that brings no surprises in its
fierce, sober argumentation; Leon Kirchner’s sweetly rhapsodic Piano
Trio No. 2, an adaptation of his recent cello concerto for Mr. Ma,
which seems to propose, quite persuasively, that the way to go beyond
Schoenberg is to go back to Zemlinsky; Mario Davidovsky’s gaunt, finely
detailed "Romancero" for soprano, flute, clarinet and cello, and Ralph
Shapey’s characteristically grim, violent "Evocation No. 2" from 1979,
with its unexpectedly delicate close.
Tanglewood’s student
musicians dedicated themselves to this vast range of new music with
unstinting commitment. A few soloists stood out: Christopher Cooper,
the noble horn player in "Canyons"; Barry Dove, the indefatigable
percussionist in the Shapey; Thomas Lehmkuhl, the wildly inventive
baritone soloist in the Kagel. One hopes the young artists go away from
the festival without institutional biases toward the opposing camps
represented. Mr. de Leeuw’s catholic, discriminating taste made
internecine polemics temporarily irrelevant.