Word: messiaen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...French Composer Olivier Messiaen a musical messiah or a voice from the jungle? Critics differed. Few claimed to understand his message. Others doubted that...
Last week, after the U.S. premiere of Messiaen's harsh, ascetic Hymne pour grand Orchestre, Manhattan music critics also failed to agree. Growled the New York Times: "... A slightly varied and highly diluted version [of Le Sacre...
Printemps'), . . . The divagations from Stravinsky . . . are not of creative significance." Said the entranced World-Telegram: "He [Messiaen] seems to stand before a shrine, chanting the vision he beholds ... a sort of fluttering commotion spread over the music." Even the Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson, who has labored to introduce Messiaen's music to the U.S., was slightly flummoxed. Wrote he: ". . . powerful and original music . . . it is our obligation as listeners ... to get inside [it], since [it does] not easily penetrate our customary concert psychology...
Meanwhile, in Paris, Messiaen was composing a "very important work" commissioned by the Boston Symphony's Conductor Serge Koussevitzky. It is a symphony, he said, which will have eight movements instead of the usual four...
Last week she sang song cycles by two great French song writers, Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen, and two songs by a 28-year-old Austrian, Gottfried von Einem, five by Paul Bowles and several by such unknown Americans as Everett B. Helm, Bela Wilda and Ned Rorem. Her voice was limited in range and occasionally harsh in the high notes, but as always, her interpretations were intelligent and distinguished by restraint...