Records
Head start
Rodney Milnes
In launching their new series of contemporary music on the slightly equivocal label 'Headline,' Decca have wisely led with a winning trump. Messiaen's La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (HEAD 1-2, £4.90) is a huge ninety-minute masterpiece, bewildering in its diversity of effect, its technical mastery and its overall emotional impact. The form is that of traditional oratorio, a mystical meditation on biblical and related texts around the theme of the Transfiguration, recalling the format of Messiah and, in the use of summing-up Chorales, of Bach's Passions. The Musical presentation is extravagantly post-romantic: in addition to chorus, orchestra and two brief vocal solos, Messiaen uses seven solo obbligato instruments of extraordinary virtuosity. The full annotation in Decca's two-disc set is as helpful as it is dangerous, re-inforcing the view 'that composers should never. be allowed to write their own Programme notes (though it must be admitted that they read better M French). The 27 named birds from Great Indicator and Scarlet T, anager to Rose-breasted Grospeak, whose calls are woven into the orchestral fabric and the over-vivid colour programme might have been better left unmentioned: they seem ripe for some specialist ornithological Manual, seedsman's. catalogue or indeed Pseud's Corner. The music, heard on its own very immediate terms, is not.
At a time when composers seem to be retreating into miniaturism, it is heartening to meet one of the Most respected and influential (his Pupils include Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis) who is not afraid of the common chord or the grand gesture, yet who can command so infinite a variety of sound experiences, whether in twenty-part choral writing that astounds the ear, rhythms of wild complexity (Messiaen's writing for percussion is still unique), progressions that could conveniently be labelled serial were they not so un-arid, and cunningly adapted liturgical chant. The colour programme may not convmcQ„ but the composer's' aural depiction of the quality of light is in a field of its own.
The recording seems faultless. The sound characteristic is fat and spacious,. catching the piece's intimacy as well as its grandeur. The performance by the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC and the Westminster Symphonic Choir of so technically difficult a score is calm and confident under the clear-headed direction of Antal Dorati, a conductor who is once more receiving from record companies the attention he deserves. Amongst the instrumentalists are Yvonne Loriod, the composer's wife inimitable on piano, and that supremely musical ,'cellist Janos Starker. Decca have done their job superbly: it is now up to the public to support them. Even the most stick-in-the-mud listener could scarcely fail to be both impressed and moved.
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