- April 6, 2023
- Posted by: AliensFaith
- Category: OBJECTIVE PRESS
Hardink/Dohr/Utah SO/Fischer
(Hyperion, two CDs)
Thierry Fischer leads the Utah Symphony in a fine new recording of Messiaen’s longest orchestral work, made in the very desert landscape that inspired it
The Utah Symphony would be justified in regarding Des Canyons aux Étoiles … (From the Canyons to the Stars …) as its signature work. For it was the spectacular landscapes of the desert state that so enraptured Olivier Messiaen on a visit in 1973 that he decided the work he had been commissioned to compose to mark the US bicentenary in 1976 would be a celebration not only of its natural beauties and colours, but also of the birds that inhabit it. Fifty years after that visit, the Utah orchestra and its music director Thierry Fischer performed Messiaen’s longest orchestral work in the very canyons that prompted the epic score, and subsequently made this recording.
In the 12 movements of Des Canyons, depictions of the Utah landscapes and, inevitably for Messiaen, the feelings of religious wonder that they inspired alternate with musical portraits of the birds – “God’s musicians” as he describes them – that sing there or sometimes elsewhere in the world. Each location and each bird is precisely identified in the titles of the movements; there’s Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe, Bryce Canyon and the Red-Orange Rocks, The Orioles, The Wood Thrush and (an African bird) The White-Browed Robin-Chat, and movements too that hint at the great beyond to which so much of Messiaen’s music aspires, such as the final Zion Park and the Celestial City.
