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Christ Church Cathedral
December 31, 2017
As I was preparing to leave the cathedral after hearing Donald Hunt play Olivier Messiaen's first masterpiece for the organ, I was approached by a woman who had been seated a couple of rows behind me. She had seen me taking notes and would I mind if she asked me a question?
The question took me aback somewhat and I strongly suspect that the reply I gave was rather less articulate that I should have desired.
It was this: "was he trying to be subversive?"
Clearly she was referring to the composer, not to organist Donald Hunt, whose performance was completely and utterly idiomatic.
My answer was that, if she meant was he trying to subvert the religious meaning of The Nativity, then nothing could be farther from the truth. Messiaen, like Bruckner before him, was a composer defined by his Catholicism and the majority of his output was dedicated to worshipping his God. As Paul Griffiths, in the New Grove, puts it, the "awesomeness of God's presence...the wonder of resurrected existence...were to remain Messiaen's favourite, indeed almost his only subjects".
But stylistically, Messiaen could indeed be viewed as subversive, even if that were not his avowed intent. Many of his pupils in his classes at the Paris Conservatoire would become notorious iconoclasts in their own right — Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen being the most prominent. To quote Griffiths once more "perhaps only Haydn, Sechter and Schoenberg can compare with him in the stature of their pupils".
If there was, then, a subversive element to La Nativité du Seigneur, then it would have been a desire to expand the terms in which (the Catholic) God could be praised. This is the first work in which Messiaen's lifelong fascination by birdsong and Greek and Sanskrit rhythms first manifests itself. He seems to be saying, perhaps not consciously, that there is more to God and His Creation than can be expressed with triple time and IV-V-I cadences.
It was gratifying to find Christ Church Cathedral, if not quite packed to the rafters, certainly far from empty, for a performance of an hour-long piece by a composer who is probably not even on most people's radar. (For myself, I must confess to a half-century's devotion to Messiaen's music, springing from my first encounter with his Turangalîla-symphonie.)
And the audience was rewarded with a superb performance. From the other worldly harmonies of the opening La Vierge et l'enfant to the final exuberantly majestic toccata of Dieu parmi nous Donald Hunt delved deeply into the music and held the audience in the palm of his hand. I loved the birdsong and irregular rhythms of Les Bergers, the lush chords — made even lusher by the pale December sunlight filtering through the stained glass — and dense, but never muddy, harmonies of Les Enfants de Dieu; and much more.
Throughout the work, Hunt lightly tossed aside the music's manifold technical challenges and his registration (the choice of which stops to employ) was exemplary, leaving us in no doubt that, whatever its other attributes, this was indubitably French music.
Before each of the nine "meditations" we had a reading, by the Dean, of the Biblical text upon which they were based. I do not know for certain which version of the Bible they were taken from (altough I suspect the New International Version) and as a non-believer it is doubtless none of my business, but I could not help but regret, at least in this context, the absence of the King James Version and its majestic language (even though much of that — by one estimate 76% of the Old Testament and 83% of the New Testament — derive from William Tyndale's earlier Bible).
Just as a single example, in the version as read, when the shepherds "living" (not "abiding") in the fields were visited by the Angel of the Lord they were "terrified". Really? People are terrified of enclosed spaces and spiders, for me those shepherds will always have been "sore afraid". (And don't even get me started on Luke 2.14)
Finally, I can only hope that Donald Hunt will give us more of Messiaen's organ music, of which there is a considerable amount. Most of the pieces are shorter than La Nativité, but I live in hope that perhaps one day Victorians will get to hear the Méditations sur le mystère de la Saint Trinité or the Livre du Saint Sacrement, both of which are significantly longer.
We do, after all, have both an organist and an organ worthy of the task.
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