December 6, 2009: Christmas with the devout Messiaen

Marino Formenti's second visit to San Francisco under the auspices of San Francisco Performances began yesterday evening at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley.  His two recitals were conceived under the general title Aspects of the Divine, and the subtitle for yesterday's performance was Twenty Glances.  This nomenclature could be taken as his personal reflection on Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus, whose twenty movements were performed without intermission over the course of about two hours.  Messiaen was certainly one of the most devout composers of the twentieth century, serving for the greater portion of his life as organist of Sainte Trinité in Paris.  He claimed (and there is no reason to doubt him) that his Catholic faith sustained him during the Second World War when he was held prisoner in the German Stalag VIIIA.  Whether or not the Vingt Regards were explicitly intended as a celebration of Christmas through mediation on the newborn Jesus (the work was composed between March 23 and September 8 of 1944), Formenti's decision to select this music was certainly seasonally appropriate.

The extent of Messiaen's devotion is evident immediately in the three and a half pages of notes provided to introduce the 177-page score of Vingt Regards.  Each movement offers a topic and brief text for meditation, and for many of the movements Messiaen gives a brief account of his compositional strategy.  Musically, the work is structured around three primary "themes."  The first theme represents God as a progression of five chords where most of the "action" takes places through subtle movements in the inner voices:

The second theme represents the entirety of the life of Jesus by standing for both the Star of Bethlehem and the Cross:

Finally, there is a "theme of chords" that Messiaen refers to metaphorically as his "rainbow" for the way in which, in the course of the cycle, its composition is broken apart and reassembled:

The pianist is therefore obliged to maintain a command of a fair amount of preparatory material before turning to the score itself.

Formenti certainly had a command of that material, as he did of each of the twenty movements.  I have no idea what his own religious convictions may be, but in yesterday's church setting he certainly performed in a way that honored Messiaen's devotion, whether or not Formenti himself embraced it with Messiaen's level of intensity.  Indeed, when he reached the half-way point of the tenth movement, "Regard de l'Esprit de joie," the look on his face made it clear that this spirit of joy figured significantly in his approach to the music.

Still, the idea of sitting in a church for an uninterrupted two hours of music in a flood of notes that run a gamut from the quietude of silent prayer to the roaring of both natural and Divine forces is liable to be daunting to many.  Fortunately, the pews at St. John's were comfortably padded;  so the physical demand was not that different from many other concert experiences.  More important, however, is that Formenti established a sense of pace as the individual movements formed a journey through Messiaen's wide diversity of meditative approaches one may take to the Nativity.  For much of that pace he could draw upon Messiaen's own intuitions for selecting and ordering the movements;  but it is clear, even from the audience side, that any actual performance (as opposed to a recording), requires scrupulous energy management if one is going to have anything left for the final burst of glory in the "Regard de 'Eglise d'amour," with its message that the "Church of Love" is the ultimate essence of a progression of faith that began with the Nativity.

Messiaen clearly never wanted to draw a firm line between what one does in a concert and what one does at a church service.  Yesterday evening's recital reinforced his position, bringing his music to speak in a church during the period of Advent.  This is music that deserves to become a Christmas tradition to be celebrated with the same annual consistency we now expect of George Frideric Handel's Messiah.  Furthermore, if we can accept the teaching standards at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as a benchmark for what we can expect of new pianists, there should be no reason why more and more venues would be not able to pursue this tradition every year around this time.

Joy to the world!