By Andrew Patner
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Read the expanded article at Andrew Patner's blog…

At U. of C., Messiaen in a bottle

REVIEW | Fest does its best trying to contain composer to 10 days

The visionary French composer and teacher Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) had such a varied output and made so many contributions to modern music that a comprehensive tribute to the 100th anniversary of his birth would take at least a year and would require a major opera house as well as numerous orchestral, chamber and vocal evenings to pull off.

Shauna Quill, executive director of the various University of Chicago Presents music series, has come up with a briefer and brilliant solution: a concentrated 10-day festival that features such well-known works as the haunting "Quartet for the End of Time" and rare performances of organ works and songs by international stars of the classical world and outstanding Chicago-based individuals and ensembles. With the first four days down, there's no doubt that Quill's project is a triumph.

Large-scale organ music can be forbidding for those not raised in the Roman Catholic or Lutheran traditions. When you add Messiaen's personal brand of Catholic mysticism and his fascination with birdsong, you have works that demand almost total surrender by the listener. Thus far the U. of C. Festival has scored two terrific successes with this side of the composer, who for 60 years had a "day job" as organist at the Church of La Trinite in Paris. Thursday's opening night was a rare evening with Dame Gillian Weir, the British queen of the multi-console instrument, performing on the recently and lavishly restored 1928 E.M. Skinner organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. By interspersing movements of Messiaen's 1949-50 "Messe de la Pentecote" with 18th-century works by Bach and Couperin, Weir created an experience that was both in keeping with Messiaen's religious goals and sonically explosive.

Friday night at Mandel Hall, the remarkable French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, one of several Messiaen students participating in the festival, made his Midwest conducting debut with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in a program that included both an exquisite performance of the 1956 "Oiseaux exotiques" ("Exotic Birds") for piano (Aimard disciple Tamara Stefanovich) and wind, brass and percussion orchestra, and also a fiery reading by Aimard of Beethoven's usually more lyrical Fourth Piano Concerto in G Major, Op. 58. Clearly clarity and power were two of many things that Aimard took away from his teacher. His breathtaking performance of Beethoven's alternate first cadenza also could have been a hat tip to Messiaen's urge always to take a different path.

The university's Contempo new music group, which draws on Chicago's eighth blackbird and Pacifica Quartet, stepped up Saturday night at Mandel Hall with a rarely played late and brief work by Messiaen and works by five of his prominent students, including a world premiere by U. of C. prof Marta Ptaszynska. As prepared or led by Cliff Colnot, all were given exceptional performances with Toro Takemitsu's haunting 1982 "Rain Spell," the seminal 1984 Pierre Boulez "Derive I" and the 1997 virtuosic George Benjamin duo "Viola/Viola" standing out. Ptaszynska's just-completed "Trois visions de l'arc-en-ciel" ("Three Visions on a Rainbow") for five players was gripping and moving.

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