olivier messiaen
-
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
-
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”;
-
You know, I haven’t written anything for weeks. It’s not a case of writer’s block as much as one of writer’s break, one of those fallow periods you have now and then. In past years, I’ve found the summer a surprisingly unproductive season: I never write on holiday (so I no longer expect myself to);
-
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
-
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 