classical music
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I can’t let today pass without noting that it would have been the 100th birthday of that great 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen, a favourite of mine. I’ve blogged before about what makes him so great for me, and my enthusiasm only deepens the more I hear his music. Radio 3 is celebrating the centenary
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My 2008 Edinburgh festival season began last night with a trip to the Usher Hall to hear the BBC SSO under Ilan Volkov perform Thomas Adès’s Tevot and Olivier Messiaen’s final work, Éclairs sur L’Au-delà. Tevot, a recent composition, was described in the programme note (which you can find here) as “effectively Adès’s second symphony”;
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I like this comment on beauty from composer Thomas Adès (from an article in the Telegraph on his recent piece about the creation): “Why would anyone be ashamed of beauty? It’s a very 20th-century idea that you might be. Thankfully that’s gone.”
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What would life be without it? Radio 3 is the cut and polished diamond of radio in Britain. I love it for the breadth of its music programming. I love it for the fact it presents whole works by default, unlike the bargain basement Classic FM. I love it for the regular new drama, even
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I must attend more live music. No matter how good a recording, it simply can’t compare to hearing the resonances shimmer away into the rafters of the concert hall. And shimmer they did last night in the hands of the pianist Benjamin Kobler, the horn player William Purvis and the NJO Summer Academy, under Reinbert
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Tomorrow evening, I’m off to an Edinburgh International Festival performance of Olivier Messiaen‘s enormous orchestral piece Des Canyons aux Étoiles, so it seems appropriate to inaugurate a projected series of occasional blog entries on the writers, musicians and artists who most invigorate me with a few words about Messiaen. Over the past few years, I’ve
Amy Jo Philip 