Music
Noble, David B.
prison for six hours. After the six-hour detention, we were released with our identity cards, without one question being Music asked. Such detention for Birzeit students, faculty, and...
...In passages in which the electronic tones were buried under It is...
...Messiaen revealed an absolutistic, monistic view of human spirituality in a synopsis he wrote of the opera's action...
...And yet, it is Grand cadences recalling cathedral organ music punctuated truly a wonder how anyone can bank on the future in the passages constructed out of electronic tones and unusual inoccupied West Bank...
...someone answers...
...and Francis's death and reception into where the goats are weeping, heaven...
...But it isn't a Messiaen stated through an interpreter that the core of the terrifying voice of thunder and lightning...
...background, into which dramatic properties (chairs, beds, or Earlier remarks by Messiaen have had more of humanistic tables) are moved as needed...
...They still make opened a window on the achievement of this century's greatest plans for the future, go to work every day (unless there is a composer of religious music...
...Is it really that clear-cut...
...The abridged American performances presented three of the enter the hope of the world, eight Tableaux of the opera: Francis's preaching to, kissing, Exit the sheep...
...Francis, particularly in the music as opposed cis receiving the Stigmata, and his resurrection in the next to the libretto...
...These passages triggered a primary response in this Tableau Four is another unforgettable sequence, and that the listener, a sense of the presence of the "unchanging" remem- symphony of the birds that follows Francis's sermon to them in bered from Latin Masses of two decades ago...
...They have has been a particularly apt expression of the spirit of Cathopicked their teeth clean, and their teeth licism in the late twentieth century...
...Exeunt 0i>>nc...
...The voice is so low, and the other so high, and the timbres are perfectly graded and modulated electronic tones clearly man- so strange that it's impossible to make out the notes...
...this compassionate musical preacher that one mostly the grand resonances of 250-odd players and singers - Fran- encounters in St...
...Exit the sheep and healing a leper...
...for advanced training, or performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the get a good job, they usually reply that it's not a question of Tanglewood Festival Chorus, amounted to a recapitulation "if" but a question of "when...
...Everything gets done in time, but very slowly...
...Tableau Five is one of the great moments in music...
...Students still go Ascension, to the six-hour-long St...
...Such detention for Birzeit students, faculty, and staff is routine...
...As this writer prepared to leave Birzeit, a student waved while themes derived from Gregorian chants intersected with good-bye and said, "Don't worry about us...
...In performance, this mixture created a profound sonic image One has absolutely no idea of what one is hearing...
...Life under occupation is life in peripheral tracks, Messiaen's most important music has been slow motion...
...the saint praying for and receiving the to the cavernous wings, off right, wounds of Christ...
...sit around and talk about their graduate careers...
...One did not hear, the whole opera, live or on record...
...It will happen sometime...
...From his path-breaking orchestral suite of 1933, The though it may take five or seven years to do so...
...Francis make it communicable aspects of Incarnation, first-class images of clear that Messiaen's personal piety, as differentiated from his awe and even of terror in the presence of the divine, leavened musical style, is quite pre-conciliar and ultra-tridentine...
...Enter the wolves from oft' left...
...we'll survive...
...Baritone Jose van Dam and tenor Kenneth Riegel, who I've given simultaneous sound to a very low voice sang the respective roles of Francis and the Leper, were which represents the bottom of the abyss of human brought over from the Paris production...
...Birzeit University students worry constantly about their papers, identifi- 0 LIVIER MESSIAEtv'S visit to the...
...Samuel...
...Are the wrestlers in more complex struggles, without such absolute turning points - Newman, for instance - really so far outside the pale...
...The faith is unchanging, he added, although symbolizations of it through T HERESE, winner of this year's Cannes special jury prize, music or stained-glass windows may change in fashion...
...Before, of this world...
...From constituted a wavering reality in comparison with the un- Conversations with Olivier Messiaen by Claude earthly projections of the ondes...
...The mere mention of "Birzeit" upon checking into airport security is enough to guarantee delays up to an hour by the security as they inspect every item of clothing, written INTONING REVERENCE material, or camera...
...Soprano Kathleen misery, with a deep and terrifying sound, a little like the Battle sang the role of the Angel...
...DAVID B. NOBLE are overriding responses to Incarnation, even at the remove of (David B. Noble, a Boston-based free-lance writer, writes Christ's perfect humanity communicated to his great saint...
...cavernous trumpetings and chants of Tibetan priests...
...Francis...
...United States earlier this cation cards, families, and their futures, but, like other Pales- year to supervise performances of excerpts from his tinians, they are extremely resilient to their daily adversity and opera, St...
...curfew or checkpoint), get married, have children, and help Except for a troubled period when his creativity flowed in their children in their studies...
...For many listeners this comEnter the Wolves poser's music, which combines European and Asian musical Enter the wolves: from off left, approaches, and traditional sounds with radically new ones, stonily gleaming...
...avowedly religious and Roman Catholic for more than half a Students continue to graduate from Birzeit University, even century...
...hardly audible...
...and synthesis of everything the composer had done before...
...Who knows for sure...
...RITES OF PASSAGE Messiaen sounded another integrist note when he said, in 'THERESE' & 'NUTCRACKER' response to a question about current questions in the church, that "There are no questions in the church...
...Francis, completed in to classes and complete a semester, even if it takes five to 1983 after eight years of work, Messiaen has labored with seven months...
...The result is both highly artificial warmth id them, without an elimination of his spiritual orienta- and at the same time realistically imitative of the restricted 5 December 1986: 659...
...This ifested a different mode of existence from that of the instru- strikes me as marvelously conveying the ideas of penimental sounds which, well played as they mostly were, still tence, reverence, and of vertigo before the Holy...
...Messiaen's ality, albeit of an odd kind...
...The Boston presentation of these, with a handful of and some bloody fool infixed up in singers in concert dress on an elevated platform surrounded by ethics and moral theology is howling, hundreds of orchestral players and chorus members, had some forever contused among crystal resemblance to photos of the equally crowded stage layout of categories of sin_ Exit the lean ,beep, the original fully costumed performances in Paris, which surl weeping...
...In a press conference held before the Boston performances, and, above, the voice of God replying...
...rounded a small stage-within-a-stage with hosts of choral singers...
...Forelucidation of the modes of limited transposition, has been tunately, in Therese director Alain Cavalier uses stark visual wiser in its recognition of the limitations of human perception images and laconic drama to convey not damnation but spirituand expression than some of his recent remarks...
...Francis of Assisi, in Boston and New York, euphoric about their collective prospects...
...subjects derived from a wide variety of bird songs, some of them transcribed in the field by Messiaen...
...is a strange religious film in the "pure" cinematic style Messiaen's own work in musical theory, particularly his derived from French masters like Robert Bresson...
...It was a regular event for me when I MESSIAEN'S 'ST...
...The eclectic variety of these musical materials can shock an Leslie Jean Coulthard unwary listener, but overall the rightness of Messiaen's assemblage is fully as startling...
...regularly on music for Commonweal...
...After the six-hour detention, we were released with our identity cards, without one question being Music asked...
...This central point of musical symbolism and many explicit In an age of the church preoccupied with graspable and details of the libretto Messiaen wrote for St...
...achievements, is both the most catholic and most Catholic of they believe in family...
...His best moments have an intense music, too, not only St...
...On by the tone-poetry and musical wit of a great composer, may the explicit, literary level of his opera, awe and self-abasement have their points to make...
...achievement stretching across six decades, testifies through Together with cinematographer Phillipe Rousselot (who seventy-times-seven examples of bold innovation, paradoxi- shot the camp treat Diva), Cavalier tells his story by focusing cal wit, and uncanny surrealistic grandeur to a more nuanced simply on the impishly beatific face of his young heroine and more active life of the human soul before God than these (Catherine Mouchet) and on one set with a soft gray-green recent comments suggest...
...after, divinized...
...Stainer and Bell, London, 1961...
...A warming example is a published comment on a moveinvitation, had directed the original performances at the Paris ment of his 1951 Organ Book: Opera...
...There he stated that in the decision and action of Francis kissing the Screen leper, "Francis became St...
...one of human frailty and divine impassibility intertwined...
...FRANCIS' taught at Birzeit University to be delayed at the airport...
...it's a voice that opera's music lay in the blending of three ondes martenots is mysterious, distant, very high, almost tender and (French electronic keyboards) into the massive orchestration...
...While thinking about graduate school is, in remarkable resourcefulness to widen the scope of what many cases, wishful thinking, students of Birzeit continue to explicitly Catholic music could and should be...
...When asked if The three substantial segments of the opera, which were they will graduate, or go to the U.S...
...The performances were conductedd by Seiji Ozawa, music Commonweal: 658 director of the Boston Symphony, who, at Messiaen's own tion...
...It is as though Palestinians are saying strumental sounds in the manner of Europe's postwar avantthat "time is on our side . . . the occupation will end some- garde (a movement virtually launched by Messiaen himself), day...
...Occupation of the West Bank leaves little over which to be optimistic, either for Palestinians or for Israelis...
...Francis, the grandest are white, their teeth arc alabaster and most stylistically inclusive of all Messiaen's in their faces: they are kind wolves...
...Francis, but also his compositional weightlessness that sends one soaring...
...The excerpts performed here leave one awaiting world - the effect was even more profound...
...Some acquainted with the but rather felt, the awesomeness of the divine present within entire score report that the music 'of the Angel Musician in 'the human...
...his works...
Vol. 113 • December 1986 • No. 21
