Average customer rating:
Jennifer Bate
Manufacturer: Regis Records/Premiere
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD
General
| Classical
| Styles
| Music
ASIN: B000060K9C
Release Date: 2007-05-29
Messiaen: Livre du Saint Sacrement, Diptyque, Verset - Jennifer Bate
Editorial Reviews Livre du Saint Sacrement World Premiere Recording Jennifer enjoys the unique reputation as a world authority on the French composer, Olivier Messiaen, and was his organist of choice. In 1975, upon hearing Jennifer Bate perform a program of his works, Olivier Messiaen wrote the following recommendation about Jennifer Bate. "...is an excellent organist, not only for her virtuosity, but also for her musicianship and sensitivity in choosing her timbres. She is a really accomplished musician who loves what she plays and knows how to make others love it too!" This marked the beginning of a close artistic association and friendship between the two.
Album Description
Grand Organ of L'eglise de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris
Verset pour la fête de la Dedicace
Diptyque
Recorded in Messiaen's presence at his organ, St. Trinité, Paris
Messiaen: Livre du Saint Sacrement, Diptyque, Verset - Jennifer Bate, Music, Olivier Messiaen, Jennifer Bate
|
Average customer rating:
|
Messiaen: Livre Du Saint Sacrement, Diptyque, Verset
Jennifer Bate Manufacturer: Regis Records/Premiere ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General
| Classical
| Styles
| Music
ASIN: B000060K9C Release Date: 2007-05-29 |
Average customer rating: 
|
Messiaen: Livre du Saint Sacrement, Diptyque, Verset - Jennifer Bate
Manufacturer: Regis Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Classical
| Indie Music
| Stores
| Music
General
| Classical
| Styles
| Music
ASIN: B0000AOGNK Release Date: 2003-07-09 |
Album Description
Grand Organ of L'eglise de la Sainte-Trinité, ParisLivre du Saint Sacrement
Verset pour la fête de la Dedicace
Diptyque
World Premiere Recording
Recorded in Messiaen's presence at his organ, St. Trinité, Paris
Jennifer enjoys the unique reputation as a world authority on the French composer, Olivier Messiaen, and was his organist of choice.
In 1975, upon hearing Jennifer Bate perform a program of his works, Olivier Messiaen wrote the following recommendation about Jennifer Bate. "...is an excellent organist, not only for her virtuosity, but also for her musicianship and sensitivity in choosing her timbres. She is a really accomplished musician who loves what she plays and knows how to make others love it too!" This marked the beginning of a close artistic association and friendship between the two.
Customer Reviews:
Poor sound compromises an otherwise worthwhile recording.......2004-01-15
The Diptyque was written in 1930, while the composer was still a student in Paris. As the title would suggest this short (twelve minutes) work is in two movements: the first of which is based around uneasily insistent chromatic figurations, the second is a slow ascending melody that was later arranged as the final movement of the famous Quatuor pour le Fin du Temps.
Verset pour la Fete de Dedicace was written thirty years later as a test piece for the Paris Conservatoire's organ class. This eleven-minute work begins with unaccompanied monody, which is contrapuntally developed to a climax before a birdsong interlude. The monody returns, it is developed again, and the birdsong re-enters at the climax.
After these short pieces, the Livre du Saint Sacrement is a massive change of scale. This work, in Messiaen's late style, is in eighteen movements, which fall into three groups. The first four (about twenty minutes in total) represent acts of adoration of Christ. The next seven (a little over an hour) depict various events in the life and death of Christ and the last seven (about forty-five minutes) represent acts of worship in the Christian church. Obviously, one does not have to share Messiaen's Catholicism to appreciate the music here, but it is useful to know the origin of the pieces, and the composer's inlay notes are helpful in giving a guide to the inspiration of them.
Stylistically, these pieces combine much of the techniques Messiaen had been using thus far in his career: plainchant-inflected monody, modal hymns, birdsong, ancient Green and Hindu rhythms, colouristic chord sequences (whose references to colours reflect the composer's synaesthesia), brief passages of total serialism, Hollywood-style schmalz, a technique the composer calls communicable language (essentially an algorithm for converting French written texts into melodic recitative) and ecstatic major-key perorations. However, many of the composer's more constructivist techniques are rather less in evidence than in his previous large-scale cycle, Meditations sur le Mystère du Saint-Trinité--certainly this work bears little trace of the 1950s modernism of the Livre d'Orgue or Messe de la Pentecote.
The first four pieces are comparatively simply written, and, with the exception of the toccata-like last piece, are mostly slow. The following seven pieces contain the most developed music in the cycle: particularly impressive are the subdued drama of the sixth piece and the complex narrative of the eleventh. This group of pieces also tend to be more lively than the first group, with the seventh and tenth pieces written largely in fortissimo and the ninth full of crashing dissonances. The final group of seven pieces alternate slow, semi-liturgical meditations with more vigorous pieces--two of which are largely fortissimo and the other of which is a birdsong collage. The final piece has an appended Alleluia in the form of a lengthy, vigorous toccata.
In some ways, Livre du Saint Sacrement stands alone amongst Messiaen's major organ works for its often rather sparse textures and extensive compositional use of silence. This makes it less appealing on first listening than much of the composer's other organ works, but--asides from the frankly rather dull first part--it strikes me as a consistently strong work. The same cannot be said for the recording; unfortunately Bate's playing has a slight tendency to hesitancy here that I didn't really noticce in her other recordings (it may simply be that this recording came very soon after the premiere of the work, whereas she had been playing the other works for over a decade before recording them). Much worse, though, is the sound quality, distant, muddy and muffled, and dramatically inferior to the other recordings in the cycle (which were made at Beauvais Cathedral and not at the Saint-Trinité). Hence, despite the appealing price, the poor sound means I can only give this recording a qualified recommendation.
Music Review:
Recommended Music:
Die Zauberflöte (Il Flauto Magico) (Selezione)
Music: Into the Glory Ride [Import]
Gloria Estefan - Greatest Hits
Couldn't Have Said It Better [Enhanced] [Import]
Die Schönsten Lieder des Nordens