Sir Simon Rattle conducts Messiaen
In this concert, the Karajan Academy, members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, pianist Kirill Gerstein and Sir Simon Rattle traverse the red canyons of Utah and up to the stars: Olivier Messiaen's Des Canyons aux étoiles... is a birthday present to the USA from the composer – and at the same time a spiritual anthem to the interweaving of the divine with nature, with the voices of birds and the colours of the rainbow.
When the New York patron of the arts Alice Tully commissioned a new work from Olivier Messiaen to mark the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States, she must have suspected that she would not receive a song of praise for American history and civilisation. She was proved right. Messiaen, a devout Catholic, composed Des Canyons aux étoiles... to “glorify God in all his creation”, with all the “beauties of the earth (its rocks and birdsong), and the beauties of the physical sky and the spiritual sky”. He was inspired by the spectacular landscape of the USA, travelling to Cedar Breaks, Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon, the “greatest wonder in Utah”.
In the words of the synaesthetically inclined composer, the full-length work revolves “around the blue of the (American songbird) Steller’s Jay and the red of Bryce Canyon”. The spiritual journey begins with a wind machine and Sahara lark in the desert, and leads via the difficult Appel interstellaire, with which principal horn player Stefan Dohr introduces the second part of the work, and the song of the star at the beginning of the third section, to the “celestial city”: Zion National Park as a symbol of paradise.
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