Review: 'Tribute to Messiaen' Twentieth Century Orchestra Concert

Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Simone Young (conductor). Friday 17 July 1998, 8 pm. Sydney Town Hall

Published in Bravo! Review, 1998.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra's tribute to French composer Olivier Messiaen, while perhaps seeming to contradict the warnings of 'DANGER!' in the Orchestra's advertising material, was a beautifully prepared and performed concert, which succeeded admirably in presenting an overview of the style of this significant twentieth-century composer. Two pieces demonstrating Messiaen's significant commitment to Christianity and passion for birdsong - La Ville d'en-Haut (1987) and Couleurs de la Cité Céléste (1963) - formed a frame for two contrasting works for soprano and orchestra: the sensual Poémes pour Mi and Australian Nigel Butterley's The Woven Light.

The framing works also displayed similar techniques (despite having been composed more than twenty years apart) - in particular a 'punctuation' form which separated elements in block-like fashion. In Couleurs de la Cité Céléste, short silences separate blocks of sound from one another. With the instrument groups also clearly delineated, the work could easily have become disjointed, incoherent; it is a tribute both to its composer and its interpreters that it did not, but maintained an austere unity throughout.

In contrast to the sublime discipline of these two works, Poèmes pour Mi, written for the composer's wife in 1936-7, is very earthly indeed. A set of nine songs for soprano and orchestra to Messiaen's own poems dealing with the 'earthly and sacramental aspects of marriage', the power of this work has been aptly compared by Paul Griffiths (in Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez, Thames and Hudson, London, 1992) to 'the guiltless erotic force of Hindu sculpture'. The lush orchestral setting envelops the luminous vocal line, creating a superb aural depiction of the 'two-become-one' aspect of marriage. An occasional obscuring of the vocal line (beautifully sung by Deborah Riedel), however, may be attributed to the acoustic of the Town Hall rather than the performers.

Nigel Butterley's The Woven Light (1993-4) demonstrates a similarly close relationship with its text as Poèmes pour Mi. Based on poems by English poet Kathleen Raine, the composer's detailed precompositional analysis of these texts found its reflection in both the structure and the detail of the music. The SSO's performance was well controlled (but not 'restrained'), although the vibrato of soloist Margaret Medlyn was a little intrusive in the higher register. Her tone, however, was as well suited to the harder outlines and drier edge of Butterley's work as Deborah Riedel's was to the luxuriantly blurred sonorities of Messiaen's music.

© 1998 Caitlin Rowley