December 6, 2009: A child's garden (or aviary?) of Messiaen

Any suggestion that pianist Marino Formenti would follow Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus, performed yesterday evening without intermission at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, with a San Francisco Performances Family Matinee event, apparently conceived with elementary school children in mind, about Messiaen would probably have been greeted with, at the very least, Spock's raised eyebrow.  However, Formenti appears to believe (as I do) that there is no need to simplify music for the sake of performing it for young audiences.  One may be more selective in what one offers;  but there is no reason to assume that any music, whether by Messiaen or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is less accessible to kids than it is to adults.  If anything, young audiences have fewer biased assumptions about what music should or should not be;  so, when someone like Formenti stands in front of them and tells them that you can make music from bird songs, they do not find that as peculiar as their more educated seniors.

Formenti selected four movements from last night's recital for his Matinee program:

• Regard des hauters: the view from the heights (or the view of the birds)
• Regard de l'Esprit de joie:  the image of the spirit of joy
• Regard des Anges:  the view of the Angels
• Regard de l'Eglise d'amour:  the image of the Church of Love

Kids could relate to the first three with little difficulty, particularly when Formenti preceded each performance with examples:  the songs of birds that Messiaen and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, had meticulously recorded and documented in music notation, the dance-like qualities of that "spirit of joy," and the "voices" of angels expressed through the intimidating sounds of their brass instruments (as in the Last Trumpet) and the massive bells of the churches (which, according to at least some sources, embodied the voices heard by the Maid of Orléans).

The result was fascinating to experience.  Initially restless, the kids in the audience were quickly drawn to the examples presented to them.  If there were any child-sounds competing with the descriptive explanations, those noises vanished when Formenti began to play.  In all probability most of the audience had never heard anything like this before, and their curiosity got the better of them.  Only the extended meditation on the Church of Love turned out to be a bit beyond their "listening grasp;"  and restlessness got the better of them.  On the whole, however, this was an audience more receptive to Messiaen than some Davies audiences have been for Anton Webern.

The success of this event probably had much to do with Formenti having a very high comfort level in talking with the children, rather than talking at them.  I would not be surprised if he could present the idea of listening to silence to them just as effectively and then treat them to a performance of John Cage's 4'33".  Last night's audience was religiously attentive, which was as true to the spirit of the entire Vingt Regards as one could wish.  Today's attentiveness came from the curiosity of childhood, and Formenti's performance reminded us of just how important exposure to music at an early age is.