126booklet 13/5/08 11:28 Page 1 ALSO AVAILABLE ON signumclassics Ragtime & Blue Brahms and Schumann Haydn Piano Sonatas Elena Kats-Chernin - Piano John Lill - Piano John Lill - Piano SIGCD058 SIGCD075 SIGCD097 Elena Kats-Chernin is a composer who Much-loved pianist, John Lill, plays John Lill returns to take the listener on a defies categorisation: a virtuosic pianist touchstones of the 19th-century romantic journey through the many moods of Haydn, and improviser, her compositions flow piano tradition. Lill is at his sparkling in brilliant performances of some from her like a fountain. This CD is best in this wonderful repertoire. composer’s most intriguing works for drawn from the small works she often the keyboard. writes for her own enjoyment - a cornucopia of rags, blues and heart- melting melodies. Available through most record stores and at www.signumrecords.com For more information call +44 (0) 20 8997 4000 126booklet 13/5/08 11:28 Page 3 MESSIAEN: CHAMBER WORKS MESSIAEN: CHAMBER WORKS The general perception of Messiaen is of a always turned up at class with mountains of work 1. Fantaisie [8.59] composer who lived in some rarefied atmosphere (not guaranteed to ensure popularity!) and was of his own, floating far above the mundane, recognised as a young man likely to succeed. But Quatuor pour la fin du Temps material world. Given his preoccupation with any view of Messiaen as vague or indecisive in his 2. Liturgie de cristal [2.37] esoteric rhythms, sound-colours, theology and opinions needs to be set against the truth - for all birdsong, this is perhaps a reasonable judgment his pacific demeanour (and, in later years, 3. Vocalise, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps [5.04] and, to some extent, true: he admitted that he had anyway, enormous charm) he was quite capable of 4. Abîme des oiseaux [8.21] never liked living in Paris and would much prefer describing Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète in a 5. Intermède [1.48] to be on some desert island without traffic or a published interview as ‘Lully with wrong bass 6. Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus [7.26] telephone. All the same, he did hold down a notes’ and damning the slow of movement of 7. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes [6.08] demanding teaching post at the Paris Conservatoire Ravel’s immensely popular G major Concerto as 8. Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps [7.21] for over 40 years and was organist at the Church turning ‘a phrase reminiscent of Fauré on a bad 9. Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus [6.56] of the Sainte-Trinité in Paris for over 60. Four of day into Massenet’. the five chamber works recorded here duly testify 10. Le Merle noir [6.24] to his close practical involvement with what we The Fantaisie for violin and piano, dating from like to call the ‘real world’. 1933, was the second of the two works Messiaen 11. Pièce pour piano et quatuor à cordes [3.07] wrote for Claire and himself to play, following the In June 1932, at the age of 23, Messiaen married Thème et Variations of 1932. It was not published 12. Morceau de lecture à vue World Premiere Recording [1.59] the violinist Claire Delbos, who had studied at the until 2007, having been disinterred by Yvonne Schola Cantorum, the teaching institution Loriod-Messiaen (whom the composer married Total Timings [66.38] founded and directed by Vincent d’Indy. Messiaen after Claire’s death in 1959) from the mass of had just been appointed to La Trinité and was materials left behind at his death. The opening beginning to make a name for himself, especially paragraph, for loud piano octaves, is decisiveness MATTHEW SCHELLHORN piano with his orchestral piece Les Offrandes oubliées, itself, even if the fluctuating time signatures SOLOISTS OF THE PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA premiered in February 1931. Later reminiscences by (13/8, 10/8, 11/8 etc.) proclaim his early interest fellow pupils record that he was quiet, self-contained, in rhythms that were at the opposite extremes www.signumrecords.com - 3 - 126booklet 13/5/08 11:28 Page 5 from the pounding regularities of the dance floor. Jésus of 1944 (a further instance of the composer 1940 for Messiaen in a German camp in Silesia. the Angel of the Apocalypse ‘who raises a hand to (We can speculate that this stirring melody’s later recycling material); the whole piece radiates the Locked in a wash-house with manuscript paper, the heavens, saying, “There shall be no more use in ‘Alléuias sereins d’une âme qui désire sort of lushness that was to upset so many critics pencils and dry bread, he proceeded to write, for time”’. However, Messiaen made it clear that a le ciel’, the second movement of L’Ascension of after the war. himself and the three other more-than-capable specific, local application was not what lay behind 1932-3, was one of the reasons the Fantaisie was instrumentalists available, one of the twentieth the score, but rather an ‘end’ on the much larger not published during the composer’s lifetime.) The Looking back now over the whole of Messiaen’s century’s most extraordinary masterpieces. scale envisaged by the Angel - ‘the abolition of overall shape of this paragraph, which contains composing life, we can see that one of the most time itself, something infinitely mysterious and much of the material for the whole work, recalls profound changes he brought about in Western For any prisoner anywhere, it is only to be expected incomprehensible to most of the philosophers of plainsong, but a plainsong expanded to include European music, more radical even than his that the experience of time should be altered. But time, from Plato to Bergson’. In detail, the songs chromatic intervals, as in much of his later music. discoveries in the fields of harmony and colour, for a prisoner of war, with no set term to his of birds in the score help destroy the traditional Perhaps the most noticeable ingredients in the was in the perception of time. At the age of imprisonment, that experience must be further symmetry of phrases and paragraphs, as do the piece are the common chords that regularly provide seventeen, in 1926, he wrote the organ piece Le distorted by the process of waiting and, for most sporadic permutations of rhythmic patterns: the resting places for the discourse, whether unadorned Banquet céleste, which was the first of many such prisoners, by anxiety. For Messiaen, though, first movement, for example, stops at what to or decorated with elegantly dissonant tracery. The extremely slow movements in which the very anxiety was a foreign country - his profound many listeners will seem to be a wholly arbitrary basic key of G major, touched on from time to time, notion of pulse comes under threat. During the Roman Catholic faith allowed him to leave the point, whatever purely mathematical justification is at last emphatically announced as the final goal. 1930s, other works such as Apparition de l’église future in the hands of God, and no listener to the can be provided by the analyst. Elsewhere éternelle continued in a similar vein, but it is fair Quatuor can mistake the positive, life-affirming Messiaen’s technique of adding small, irregular Before the Second World War Messiaen taught for to say that he made no new breakthrough on this spirit of each and every bar. Reminiscences of rhythmic values to longer ones disrupts any end- a time at the École Normale de Musique and in front until the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps fellow-prisoners testify both to Messiaen’s directed pulse (for example, at the beginning of 1934 he wrote a Morceau de lecture à vue - a (‘Quartet for the end of Time’). equanimity and spiritual strength in captivity and the ‘vigorous, granite-like’ sixth movement, in sight-reading piece - for the piano exams there. to the impact the first performance of this work which the harmonic spectrum contracts Even if he had pity on the students’ rhythmic The circumstances of the work’s composition are had on the 400 prisoners in Hut 27B on 15 January arrestingly into naked single notes and octaves, capabilities (the piece is in 6/8 throughout), there striking enough for them to have made a niche for 1941; as the composer himself said, ‘I was never the first two bars contain 17 and 13 semiquavers are plenty of accidentals to sort out, often through themselves in twentieth-century musical history. listened to with such attention and understanding.’ respectively, arranged as 2+2+2+1+2+2+4 and his use of what he rather cumbersomely called his Composers frequently complain that, what with 2+2+1+2+1+1+4, with the underlined value ‘second mode of limited transposition’, a scale of promotional appearances, committees and the If faith expels anxiety, it permits hope. The ‘end of being the disruptive element). alternating tones and semitones. The opening like, they have a job to find enough uninterrupted time’ of the title might reasonably be taken to five-note motif would later be developed into the time for composition. In a prisoner-of-war camp refer partly to the hoped-for end of Messiaen’s The work’s symbolism is too rich to be done full ‘Theme of Love’ in the Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant- such distractions are absent - as they were in incarceration, even if the explicit reference is to justice in a programme note.