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September 20, 2010
John Ogdon plays Messiaen
Despite my admiration for Olivier Messiaen as a teacher, thinker and snappy dresser, I can only take so much of his music. There's a lot of it, too – a lot of pieces, many of them very long and, after a certain point, hard to distinguish from all the other very long, very loud expressions of Messiaen's heterodox Catholic mysticism. Morton Feldman's criticism is pertinent: ('that's not orchestration ... I don't know what the hell it is! It's Walt Disney ... it's technicolor!') So is the tacit, indirect criticism which can be inferred from the many pieces that his former student Pierre Boulez has chosen not to conduct.But I am always susceptible to enthusiasm – for instance, Edward Said wrote an engaging defense of 'Saint François d'Assise' that sent me back to the recording with good results. Thanks to the committed advocacy of Peter Serkin and Reinbert de Leeuw, a New York concert of 'Des Canyons aux Etoiles' was absolutely convincing and unforgettable. ('Des Canyons aux Etoiles' is Messiaen's 2-hours-plus U.S. Bicentennial blockbuster with solo piano obligato, walk-on parts for every bird in Utah and Nevada and a wind machine cadenza in all three of its subsections and its twelve movements.)
(You can't talk about Messiaen without mentioning birds and I want to insert a paragraph here thanking the composer for changing forever the way I hear birdsong. As a kid, I had my bird-watching phase. ((Stamp-collecting, amateur botany and model-rocketry were my other childish hobbies until I seized on music, which, despite my father's prediction that it was another piece of childish dilettantism, followed me out of my childhood and became my full-time foolish adult dilettantism.)) My big bird-watching break was spotting a rare pileated woodpecker in our backyard in Atlanta. The teenage discovery of the 'Quatuor pour la fin du temps' made me madly enthusiastic about Messiaen and his bird-transcribing. It's a fact that can't be repeated too often: birds were the inventors of music. They invented it long before people did and have passed it down unbrokenly to this day, while the tens of centuries of human musical endeavor before the advent of notation and sound recording is lost for good.)
John Ogdon's Messiaen is another piece of effective advocacy. Much of Ogdon's recorded repertoire is not to my taste. And at times he seems to have coasted on his transcendental sight-reading ability to make dazzling but incoherent recordings. Ogdon's 1969 'Vingt Regards' for Argo is an undeniable miracle, the best of Messiaen and the best of Ogdon. It is an extreme performance: much much slower than Yvonne Loriod's classic mono recording – with nearly superhuman delineation of Messiaen's superimposed rhythmic layers. The recorded dynamic range is also extreme. Unfortunately, Argo's pressings were often not very good, and this one, with side lengths averaging 32 minutes, is just about untameable. I spent months trying. I used every trick in the book, both physical (scrubbing, scraping, stroking the surfaces) and digital (from manual declicking to equalization.) I'd nearly given up for good when I found a sealed copy at the local used rock and roll emporium. I made a just-about-passable transfer and would have settled for that, but before I could post it, God placed at my disposal this now-discontinued Decca CD reissue.
Although this is taken from the CD, I have included scans from the Argo LP along with the front and back covers of Decca's out-of-print reissue (the liner notes are the same in both editions.) On a semi-related note, if anyone has made a transfer of John Ogdon's RCA LP recording of Beethoven's Op 106, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, I may be forced to share my own needledrop from a badly-nicked copy (it's a very good 'Hammerklavier'.)
John Ogdon – Messiaen: 'Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jesus' SIDES ONE AND TWO
John Ogdon – Messiaen: 'Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jesus' SIDES THREE AND FOUR
Originally from Avant que j'oublie, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 20, 2010 at 08:13 PM