Hommage à Olivier Messiaen
Monday 22nd & Tuesday 23rd October 2012
The name of Olivier Messiaen stirs in us a multitude of associations and images. To many, he was first and foremost a master of harmonic and orchestral colour, a natural product of his synaesthesia, which caused him to experience the sensation of colour when he heard or imagined music. To others, he was the archetypal ornithologist/composer, fascinated and endlessly inspired by the variety and musicality of birdsong. To the multitude of students whom he taught over his thirty-seven year lectureship at the Paris Conservatoire he was a living legend and a beloved mentor.
From the organ loft at Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where he served as organist from 1931 until his death in 1992, Messiaen delivered his musical reflections on God, the cosmos, and the profound spirituality which drove his creativity. Indeed, it was for the keyboard that he was to write some of his most personal and exploratory music.
Commemorating twenty years since the passing of this titan of contemporary music, Musicon opens its 2012/13 concert season with two concerts of Messiaen's keyboard music, highlighting some of the most intriguing and breathtaking facets of his enormous musical legacy.
Hommage à Olivier Messiaen 1
Monday 22nd October 2012
7:30pm Durham Cathedral
Kevin Bowyer – organ
Programme:
Olivier Messiaen
Apparition de l’église éternelle
Messe de la Pentecôte
Les Corps glorieux
Musicon is pleased to welcome world-renowned organist Kevin Bowyer to Durham Cathedral for the first of two celebratory concerts devoted to the music of Olivier Messiaen. The concert will showcase three major Messiaen pieces which span the first twenty years of the composer's career.
Apparition de l'église éternelle, from 1932, is one of his most impressive early works, giving not a few hints of his future direction. Messe de la Pentecôte, composed in 1949-50, is another high-water mark of Messiaen's first period of compositional output, written just before the composer began his well-known explorations of birdsong from the early 1950's onward. Bowyer rounds off the programme with the sublime Les Corps glorieux from 1939, a meditative piece in seven movements.
Kevin Bowyer has been internationally active as a performer and teacher for nearly three decades, with frequent performances throughout Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. He has been hailed by Gramophone magazine as "a superb player, not only technically brilliant, but profoundly musical", and by Fanfare as "one of the most exciting organists now active". Kevin Bowyer has made acclaimed recordings of the complete Bach, Jehan Alain, and Brahms, in addition to numerous CDs with new music by some of today's most important composers, including Jonathan Harvey and Brian Ferneyhough. He is currently preparing a complete critical edition of the three Organ Symphonies of Kaikhosru Sorabji, as well as live performances and CD recordings of all these works. Since 2005 he has been engaged as organist to the University of Glasgow.
Tickets: £10, Students £4, Under 18s £1
Box Office: Gala Theatre, Millennium Place, Durham
Tel: 0191 332 4041
Hommage à Olivier Messiaen 2
Tuesday 23rd October 2012
7:30pm University Music School, Palace Green
Peter Hill – piano Benjamin Frith – piano
Programme:
Maurice Ravel
Entre cloches
Olivier Messiaen
Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu (from Préludes)
Cantéyodjayâ
Visions de l'Amen
Musicon welcomes pianists Peter Hill and Benjamin Frith to the University Music School for a concert of piano solos and duets by Messiaen and Ravel. Opening the concert is Ravel's vibrant and reflective Entre cloches, the second of a two-part work for two pianos, Sites auriculaires, from 1897. One of Messiaen's earliest published works, Cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu from the Préludes (1929) showcases not only the young composer's technical mastery of the keyboard, but also the clear influence of his predecessors Debussy and Ravel. Cantéyodjayâ reflects Messiaen's research into the 120 rhythms described in the Sangitaratnakara, a 13th century Hindu text of Sarngadeva. The concert concludes with the magisterial Visions de l'Amen for two pianos, from 1943.
Peter Hill is a scholar and pianist working mainly in the twentieth-century and contemporary repertoires. He studied at Oxford and at the RCM, where his teachers included Cyril Smith and Nadia Boulanger. He was awarded first prize at Darmstadt (1974) for his performances of Cage and Stockhausen, and his complete recording of Messiaen's solo piano works, made with the composer´s help and encouragement, has been described as 'one of the most important recording projects of recent years' (New York Times). Peter joined the staff at Sheffield University in 1976. He is co-director with Peter Cropper of the MA in Music Performance, and teaches undergraduate courses on Messiaen, Mozart, Baroque counterpoint, and Performance.
Benjamin Frith was encouraged by his teacher, Dame Fanny Waterman, to pursue a musical career after winning the British Dudley National Concerto Competition at fourteen. He became a Mozart Memorial Prize winner at the age of twenty, and was invited by Sir Peter Pears to appear at the Aldeburgh Festival. He achieved international recognition by sharing top prize in the 1986 Busoni International Piano Competition and first prize in the 1989 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition. He made his début at the Edinburgh Festival in 1992 with an acclaimed interpretation of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. He has given recitals and concerto performances worldwide with many leading orchestras and conductors including Zubin Mehta, Antoni Wit, Gianandrea Noseda, and Tamás Vásáry.
Tickets: £10, Students £4, Under 18s £1
Box Office: Gala Theatre, Millennium Place, Durham
Tel: 0191 332 4041
