MUSIC OF MESSIAEN ELEVATES SOULS AT ST. ANTHONY'S

Orpheus presents pianists Andreas Werz and Hatem Nadim in monumental French composition.

By Walter Saul - April 24, 2010

The spacious and ornate sanctuary of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church at first had only a few dozen souls present Friday to experience Olivier Messiaen’s monumental Visions de l’amen. But a steady trickle swelled the audience to over 150 to spend a breathtaking hour with Messiaen’s apocalyptic masterpiece under the capable hands of Fresno State pianists Andreas Werz and Hatem Nadim. How grateful we should be to Orpheus for presenting this wonderful and epochal work here in Fresno!

Orpheus was wise, as well, to choose this magnificent house of worship with its lofty ceilings and prominent crucifix as the backdrop for Messiaen’s bold sonic depiction of the apocalypse of Jesus Christ. But this work, so outspoken in adoration of Christ, presents its own confrontation with the pervasive secularism of our culture, particularly in the fine arts. The question remains: how does one prepare the audience for such a piece? The introductory speaker suggested closing our eyes and imagining the color blue while taking deep breaths. More appropriate, I believe, would have been to take a cue from Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Theater: insist that the audience enter in silence and have the very first sounds heard at all be the music itself. It needs no introduction or a pretense at spiritual preparation.

Visions de l’amen consists of seven movements taking us from the creation of Genesis through the new creation of Revelation. As Messiaen points out in his copious notes, “Amen of Creation” is one long crescendo from the low whispered opening rumbles to the huge, dramatically rolled chords depicting creation’s completeness. As the first piano (Andreas Werz) plays dissonant chords at seemingly random intervals, the second piano (Hatem Nadim) states the main theme in the bright blue key of A Major through its ascending registers. It is easy to get too loud too quickly and run out of room for further crescendo in this long movement, a temptation to which Nadim succumbed in an otherwise spellbinding performance.

“Amen of the stars, of the ringed planet” opens with a motto stated in low octaves in the second piano, prominently highlighted by Nadim, against a marvelous filigree set exquisitely in the background by Werz. These are the roles Messiaen designated for the pianos: Piano II (the part Messiaen played himself) is given “the principal melody, the thematic elements, everything demanding emotion and power” while Piano I (which Messiaen wrote for his student and future wife Yvonne Loriod) has “the rhythmic difficulties, the bunches of chords, everything concerned with speed, allure and quality of sound.” Again, wonderfully precise execution of the music, but the dynamics could have been more varied and interesting here.

The third movement, “Amen of the Agony of Jesus,” features ominous wedges of sound that musically paint the suffering depicted in the crucifix directly above the pianos. In the closing Epode, the music of the opening “Amen of Creation” was beautifully coupled with the wedges of suffering of Jesus on the cross, though I would welcome even more of a transformed statement of the creation theme in reflecting Christ’s torture here.

“Amen of Desire” pits a very tonal, almost Broadway-like theme in the second piano against otherworldly notes of the first piano. Here’s where a vivid imagination of Heaven is so essential. Nadim projected the melody clearly and elegantly above the splendid texture woven skillfully by Werz, but this melody needs to be sung with a more legato line, not merely played note to note. This substantial movement saw Nadim often rising dramatically from his seat to gain yet more power for the closing fistfuls of notes tossed over the entire keyboard.

The evening’s highlight was the fifth movement, “Amen of the angels, of the saints, of bird song.” While the opening octaves in both pianos suggested some ensemble difficulties, the myriad birdsongs of Messiaen (himself a master ornithologist) were colorfully and flamboyantly displayed through the coupled virtuosity of Werz and Nadim, truly a unit here.

The brief “Amen of Judgment” features harsh chords and grumpy bass clusters as it depicts God’s final judgment upon the cosmos. The finale, “Amen of Consummation,” gathers themes from the previous movements, notably the Creation theme again, and shifts through several gears and a trinity of tonalities before arriving at the home key of A Major for a thrilling end.

While I would long for Messiaen and the Werz-Nadim duo to do more to emphasize contrasts, especially between the joys of Paradise and the specter of eternal punishment, particularly in “Amen of Judgment”, the arts culture of Fresno has been greatly enriched by the presentation of this powerful and challenging work.