Messiaen: La Fauvette Des Jardins / Offrandes Oubliees

Description

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)Les offrandes oubliées • Fantaisie burlesque • Pièce pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas • Rondeau • Prélude (1964) • La fauvette des jardinsOlivier Messiaen is among the most influential figures in the music of the twentieth century. At first alarming and shocking audiences, he later won an unassailable position, respected at home in France and abroad for his achievement through a musical language that is intensely personal, emotional and informed by a deep Catholic piety. Born in Avignon in 1908, he started piano lessons in 1917 and two years later entered the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Marcel Dupré, Maurice Emmanuel and Paul Dukas. In 1931 he was appointed organist at La Trinité and held this position until his death, writing, particularly in the 1930s, a number of important compositions for the organ. In 1940, as a prisoner-of-war in Silesia, he wrote his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), returning, on his release in 1942, to the Conservatoire. There he taught harmony but exercised even stronger influence in the following years through his teaching of analysis and his work at various centres abroad. As a composer his attention was now turned also to composition for the piano, inspired by his pupil Yvonne Loriod, who became Messiaen’s second wife in 1962, three years after the death of his first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos. Yvonne Loriod continued as a leading exponent of his music. In 1966 Messiaen became professor of composition at the Conservatoire and the following year was appointed a member of the Institut de France. In 1971 he received the Erasmus Prize and in 1978 retired from the Conservatoire, although his influence continued unabated. He died in Paris in 1992. Messiaen’s very personal musical language was derived from a number of sources. His interest in bird-song is directly evident in his Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds) and Catalogue d’oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds) and indirectly elsewhere in his music. Describing himself as a rythmicien, he had a profound interest in Greek verse rhythms, Hindu rhythms and the rhythms of major Western composers, from Claude Le Jeune to Stravinsky and Debussy. His harmony draws on a combination of sources, from serialism and atonality to tonal and modal writing, with an idiosyncratic use of organ registration and orchestral colour.The orchestral Les offrandes oubliées (The forgotten offerings) was completed in 1930, with a piano version. The orchestral work was first performed the following year. It is in the form of a triptych, representing the Cross, the descent of Man into Sin, and finally the offer of salvation through the Eucharist. Musically this is suggested by the use of a ternary structure. The work opens with a passage marked Presque lent, douloureux, profondément triste (Almost slow, sorrowful, deeply sad). The melancholy ser