Browse by Artist: MESSIAEN, OLIVER

Artist:	MESSIAEN, OLIVER
Title:	Visions de l'Amen
Label:	BRIDGE RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	BRIDGE 9324CD

"In the spring of 1943, in German-occupied Paris, a select audience of invited guests gathered at the Galerie Charpentier for the first performance of Olivier Messiaen's new work for two pianos, Visions de l'Amen. Although originally one of several pieces on the program, a printed announcement of a change of date explained that 'the significance, the character and the duration of this work have led the Concerts de la Pléiade to present it in a concert which will be entirely devoted to it.' Performed by Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, Visions represented the first musical collaboration between the two, and the beginning of a personal and creative partnership that would endure for half a century. This new recording brings together two leading performers of Messiaen's music -- pianists Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken."
"...a powerful performance.... For Messiaen, who experienced a type of synesthesia, a particular color could evoke harmonies or sounds. He composed Visions mostly in the key of A, which he associated with blue, the color of the sky and eternity. Ms. Nonken and Ms. Rothenberg (who studied Messiaen's music in Paris with Ms. Loriod) demonstrate a deep understanding of this shimmering, colorful score..." -- New York Times

Artist:	MESSIAEN, OLIVER
Title:	Complete Works For Piano Solo Vol. 1
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD/SACD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10907/8CD

"Markus Bellheim opens the present recording of the piano works of Olivier Messiaen with a major piece, one in which various key elements of the composer's later music come well to the fore: a French sense of mysticism, synesthesia, the ascetic, the love of the voices of nature, and the notion that our senses may be honed if we listen in to foreign musical cultures with their rich hoard of melody and rhythm. In 'Regard des prophètes, des bergers et des Mages,' exotic colours dominate. And in 'Regard de l'Esprit de Joie,' the Oriental source of Gregorian chant is immediately recognizable. The 'Vingt Regards' were written in 1944 in Paris, in the months before the city was freed. They are a document of expectation, of contemporaneity, and are an expression of an unruly era in which life would be defined anew and where a hunger for the future was to exist." Stereo/multichannel hybrid SACDs that can be played on any CD player.

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