Thunder rolled around the hills above Salzburg on Sunday evening, the rain bucketed down on the cobbled streets, and the scene was set for some late-night Messiaen. Pierre-Laurent Aimard had made a selection of six pieces from Catalogue d’Oiseaux, and picked out its sweeter cherries in an hour-long sequence of his own ingenious devising. In doing so, he presented an unusually friendly side to a cycle now eclipsed by Messiaen's earlier Vingt Regards with their lush harmony and devotional sentiment.
The disarmingly straightforward title of Catalogue can lead listeners down the wrong garden path. There is nothing either academic or literal about these 13 pieces which were composed during Messiaen’s most experimental period of the late 1950s. On one level they can be experienced as chorale fantasias on birdsong, an extension of Messiaen’s thinking and practice as an organist. On another, they describe not just the birds themselves but the specific time and space around them, emulating Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage as spiritual landscapes. Even so, the Catalogue also makes radical experiments with timbre, time and continuity which places it side by side with the sometimes challenging postwar work of Messiaen’s students such as Boulez and Stockhausen, as though the old boy was reminding his young Turks that he could still poke a bee’s nest if he wanted to.
On Sunday, these disparate elements to the Catalogue were all present but in the event rendered subsidiary to Aimard’s charisma as a stage animal, and to his willingness to take risks in concert with music which he has lived with for decades. He eased us in with Le Traquet stapazin (the black-eared wheatear), and whether or not the context played a factor in his playing or my perception of it as a late-night jazz improvisation, this was a portrait of Messiaen as cool and relaxed as he gets during the 1950s. Putting all his elbow into the piano during the final chorale, Aimard drew out a visionary rapture which cannot readily be experienced on recordings, even his own.
Le Loriot (the golden oriole) followed suit, lavish in weight and expression and filled with love and wonder, surely not just for the irrepressible joy of the oriole’s song but for the composer’s muse at the time, soon to be wife, Yvonne Loriod. The inner glow of that love effectively prefaced the dazzling light and crashing waves of the Cote d’Azur as filtered through Messiaen’s tone-picture of Le Merle bleu (the rock thrush), the central section of which passed as if in a single, hypnotically extended moment of birds and sea and sky all fused together, like a furious Oscar Peterson solo, rising to a breathtaking cataract of sound at the climax.
Yes, it was loud, even in the following Le Courlis cendré (the curlew) which usually closes out the Catalogue in a spirit of mute despair (uniquely so for Messiaen). I briefly wondered if Aimard would break a hammer with the implacable boom of the lighthouse over the Brittany coastline. The mood then lifted with the kooky humour and deadpan call of La Chouette hulotte (the tawny owl), though Aimard’s breadth of phrase and control of timbre also drew out striking prefigurations of the ring-modulated, flickering-consonance sound world of Stockhausen’s later Mantra of 1970, like an old television on the fritz. Rather than that mournful curlew, Aimard closed out this edited Catalogue with L’Alouette-lulu (the woodlark) which, like Le Loriot, draws unforgettable pathos from a four-chord trick, a reflective refrain simultaneously obvious and yet opening new vistas with each varied refrain. Even as the woodlark’s song seems to fall down the stairs and back up again, with no friends to help him, Aimard leant into the Mozarteum’s generous acoustic, and the palpable concentration of the audience, to make another fleeting vision of nature at one with itself, and with us.
