Last night I went to the Edinburgh International Festival performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’au-delà – which is usually translated as Illuminations of the Beyond – at the Usher Hall, played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with a sprightly young fellow named Ilan Volkov conducting.
In my seat in the upper circle I waited for the first chord, which begins the piece in a strangely unassuming way, catching you unaware, as if the orchestra is picking up a performance midway through – which helps give it an eternal, cyclical quality. But when the performance started I was puzzled. I didn’t recognize it at all. I mean, yes, it’s an unassuming opening for sure, and I’d listened to it only twice in the days approaching the concert, but there would have been some spark of recognition even in the first few bars – wouldn’t there?
Shit. I was sure it must have been Messiaen, because when I was booking my seat on the website I’d clicked book now almost as soon as I’d seen his name, but because of my haste I hadn’t taken in who was performing it, and now I thought perhaps I’d read the title of the work wrongly. After all, I reasoned, I don’t know French and many of his works have similar themes, and therefore maybe similar names. On top of this I hadn’t bought a program. “Programs? Pah!” Well, as the music continued I quickly realised that I had certainly not heard it before, but the only thing I could do was sit back, watch and listen.
It lasted around 20-25 minutes and it was mesmerizing and exciting and organic. After buying a program at the interval – and I had to satisfy myself that it was an interval, and not just the end of the concert, by noting the people heading for the bar – I discovered that the main event was preceded with Tevot, a new work by Thomas Adès. Well, what a bonus. Now I’ve discovered a new composer.
I’m going to have to listen to Tevot again, because I can’t recall it in detail, but it was a powerful experience. I always wonder about the difference between listening at a concert and listening to a recording – and there is a huge difference – and in this case I am very happy that I was introduced to it this way. As I watched the players perform, a strange thing happened. The music was mainly strings at this point, a confusing, tense storm of a sound, and I began to see only the string-players’ hands, as if disembodied and riding on the waves of a dark sea. And because, if I remember correctly, the string players were not at all playing in unison but were divided into groups, it actually looked as it sounded, a battle of swelling and subsiding forces, the hands rising and falling in all kinds of directions, but smoothly and wave-like in overall effect. It was like some kind of alternative Mexican Wave.
Then later on, at some point in Illuminations, the same thing happened, and it was interesting to compare the experiences. This time it was not a swelling sea but a churning, choppy, angry sea, with hands being thrown all over the place by crashing waves.
There may not be any explicit connection between either piece of music and the sea, but in this case it serves as a useful metaphor, a way of describing and picturing the sound, of making sense of it.
As I say, I had listened to Illuminations a couple of times in preparation for the gig, and I couldn’t find any affection for it, except for the odd delicious chord or sonority here and there. On the whole I found it dull, disjointed and over-long. I was brought to the piece through getting to know two of Messiaen’s other works, the Quartet for the End of Time and the Turangalila Symphony. These are amazing, immediately ear-catching pieces, with serene beauty, fearsome monolithic harmonies and rhythms, and rich otherworldly sounds, as befitting the themes of religious ecstasy and love, as seen through Messiaen’s particular mystical lens. But Illuminations seemed to me to be a lesser child of these two pieces.
The good news is that the concert changed my mind. The bad news is that I can’t really say how or why. I think the dynamic subtleties really came out at the concert. The recording seemed quite flat, but at the concert the extremes of loud and soft were clear and essential.
That particular benefit was maybe to do with the acoustics of the Usher Hall. Although the sound might be a bit messy when there’s a lot going on, it’s nice and loud. It was much preferable to the performance of the Turangalila Symphony I saw in the vast Royal Festival Hall in London, where the sound was clean but quiet and the musicians were half a mile away.
The presence of a fidgeting man in front of me; an unidentified farter; several people who left noisily at the beginning of the last of the eleven movements, of a 65-minute piece of music; none of that spoiled it for me.