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Olivier Messiaen is widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the 20th century, known for his unique approach to harmony, rhythm, and melody. His music is challenging for any performer, requiring not only technical skill, but also a deep understanding of his unique musical language. The pianists presented here demonstrate a remarkable ability to capture the essence of Messiaen’s music, bringing out its intricate harmonies, colours, textures and rhythms, as well as its emotional depth. Yvonne Loriod Messiaen’s student, muse and second wife, Yvonne Loriod was a highly accomplished pianist in her own right. Many of his piano works were written with her in mind. The Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (“Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus”) were dedicated to Loriod, and she premiered the work at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in March 1945. Loriod’s playing is known for its clarity and precision, as well as her ability to capture the essence of Messiaen’s unique style. She recorded several albums of Messiaen’s piano music, including the complete set of Preludes and the Catalogue d’Oiseaux.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is widely recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Messiaen’s music. Aimard’s connection to Messiaen’s work runs deep, as he was a student of the composer and worked closely with him and his wife Yvonne Loriod. Aimard’s recordings of Messiaen’s piano music are considered some of the most authoritative, and he has performed Messiaen’s works all over the world to critical acclaim.
Angela Hewitt Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt is perhaps best known for her interpretations of Baroque and Classical music, but she has also made a name for herself in more contemporary repertoire, including Messiaen’s piano music. Her recordings of Messiaen’s music are admired for their technical precision and attention to detail, as well as her ability to bring out the emotional depth of the music. Steven Osborne Scottish pianist Steven Osborne has performed Messiaen’s music all over the world, including the Vingt regards and Turangâlila Symphonie. Osborne expertly navigates the intricate harmonies and rhythms in Messiaen’s music with ease, bringing out the complex textures and polyrhythms that are hallmarks of the composer’s style. At the same time, he captures the emotional breadth and spiritual intensity that are crucial features of Messiaen’s music. His performances of the Vingt regards in particular are extraordinarily absorbing, meditative and moving, combining musicality, virtuosity and commitment. (I’ve heard Osborne perform this monumental work twice in London and on both occasions it has been utterly mesmerising and profoundly emotional.) Tal Walker For his debut disc, the young Israeli-Belgian pianist Tal Walker included Messiaen’s Eight Preludes. Composed in the 1920s, they are clearly influenced by Debussy with their unresolved or ambiguous, veiled harmonies and parallel chords which are used for pianistic colour and timbre rather than definite harmonic progression. But the Preludes are also mystical rather than purely impressionistic, and look forward to Messiaen’s profoundly spiritual later piano works, Visions de l’Amen (for 2 pianos) and the Vingt regards. Tal Walker displays a rare sensitivity towards this music and his performance is tasteful, restrained yet full of colour, lyricism and musical intelligence.
Other Messiaen pianists to explore: Tamara Stefanovic, Peter Hill, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Ralph van Raat, Benjamin Frith, Peter Donohoe
This article first appeared on InterludeHK
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Guest post by Lewis Kingsley Peart

Paderewski was an extraordinary character. Not only was he a world-renowned concert artist, but he was also the prime minister of Poland for a brief period. He maintained a ferocious touring schedule and was adored by audiences everywhere he went. He was so admired that people in the US would gather in their thousands just to see his train go by. The fact that Irving Berlin mentions the great virtuoso in his popular 1920 song, I Love a Piano, is a further testament to his fame and success:

“And with the pedal I love to meddle

When Padarewski comes this way

I’m so delighted if I’m invited

To hear that long haired genius play …”

While Paderewski was best known for his interpretations of works by Chopin and Liszt, he also wrote some charming music of his own. The Minuet in G, Op. 14 No. 1 is a piece that became world-famous, even overshadowing his larger-scale works such as the Piano Concerto in A Minor. The Minuet in G is very much a pastiche of the classical style, full of musical jokes and witticisms to tease and delight the listener.

The few opening bars of the piece present material that is incredibly simple: a narrow-ranged melody clothed in diatonic harmony. This continues for several bars until a rising left hand line (bar 15: C – C – C# – D); it is at this point that the strap of the gown is lowered off the shoulder, the champagne is poured, and the piece broadens into an effervescent musical treat. The piece offers many opportunities for the player to display their pianistic gifts: raucous octaves that thunder into the bass register, light-as-a-feather trills, a central lyrical section, and a nimble-fingered coda to finish. There’s also plenty of opportunity for a suggestive rubato here or the bringing out of an inner line there, if you’re in the mood, which I often am!

Many pianists have recorded the Minuet in G from Rachmaninoff to Liberace. You can hear (and see!) Paderewski himself playing the work here:

Rachmaninoff’s recording is a particular favourite of mine. He turns this small musical bonbon into a beautifully crafted jewel:

I’d also like to share with you my recording from a recital I gave in London earlier this year:

 

This article first appeared on Lewis Kingsley Peart’s website

Based in both London and Manchester, Lewis Kingsley Peart enjoys a busy life as a working musician. Organising projects as both soloist and collaborator, he programmes a wide variety of music from the traditional classical canon, right through to jazz and the avant-garde. With a strong background in theatre, his appearances are never without verve. 

Lewis made his debut at St. John’s, Smith Square in March 2018 in a programme of music celebrating the 75th birthday of the American composer, Stephen Montague. In the summer of 2021, he had the privilege of working with British concert pianist and composer, Stephen Hough, on his third piano sonata, ‘Trinitas’, for the Trinity Laban New Lights Festival of Contemporary Music. Highlights of the 2022 season included a concert for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at St. Mary’s Cathedral, and his debut recital at London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Lewis looks forward to future recital engagements and is excited to make his concerto debut in 2024. 

Lewis is a Chethams School of Music alumnus and graduate of London’s Trinity Laban Conservatoire where he studied with Philip Fowke and Alisdair Hogarth. 

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… PLAY THE MUSIC !

Guest post by Alberto Ferro

Inspirational yet enigmatic, the recommendation to NOT PLAY THE NOTES is typically given in music classes of conservatories all around the world. It suggests that a musician should forget about technical things and focus on the poetic content of the music. Easy to say. And it doesn’t even remotely hint at how that shall be accomplished. How can one play the music without playing notes? Is it perhaps figurative speech?

What is the relationship between music and notes? Music is a way to communicate ideas, emotions, aesthetic content, and the notes are a notational device that helps reconstructing the complex series of actions necessary for music to be performed. While music is an undefinable, ephemeral phenomenon, a musical score is an inescapable, very tangible instruction manual that conveys in a rigorous way how to produce refined combinations of sounds on your instrument. The score (and every kind of musical notation) is a practical tool instructing on practical operations. What scores don’t show are the poetic intention, and they never will.

A note is possibly the smallest item we can identify in a score, a small brick in the architecture of a piece. The similarity with written language is striking: like notes, letters are meaningless by themselves but necessary to form words and phrases of content. In language, for a sentence to acquire meaning it must be organized properly at the level of letters, words and above; syntax, content, punctuation, vocabulary, etc.

Musical notes are grouped into motives, phrases, periods that are dynamic, contextualized by further levels such as harmony, organized in rhythms, sections, according to proportions, characterized by articulations, etc. The score presents all of it in visual form, through black dots on white paper: it takes some years of musical education to see all of that just by studying the score. Even more significantly, seeing doesn’t exactly translates in hearing, and even less easily transforms in performing.

Notes and music belong to two quite different dimensions: instrument and art, instruction and expression, gesture and intention. The ability to maintain the former at the service of the latter is possibly the highest way of conducting ourselves in music.

When you listen to music, do you hear notes or do you pay attention to the music? What is more rewarding, to connect with the poetic message or to detect intervals, tonalities, chords, and notes? Any listener knows that music is relevant when it goes beyond its means of production: every score looks the same, black dots on paper, how uninteresting, but every piece of music is unique. The most passionate listeners don’t hear pianos, cellos, oboes, but emotions, art, sublime ideas, pure creations, etc.

As instrumentalists, when do you stop playing notes and start playing the music? As you practice, there is a point where you have grown so much familiarity with the piece that the score stops showing notes and starts presenting an emotional roadmap, a poetic journey, an aesthetic design. What makes a piece of music exciting are the ideas, colours, gestures, the human characters we find in it, so we must practice it until these emerge, until sound projects ideas, colours, gestures or characters.

‘You must learn by memory, then forget’. The score ought to be forgotten so to express the human message that is in the sound and missing from the score. Or, only when we ‘play without thinking’ music acquires a deeper meaning, since thinking is the very process by which we inhibit more instinctive ways of expression, and the number one reason we get distracted while listening to music.

Start with one bar, one phrase, one chord, and when it works build up from there: the bar, the chord, the phrase, will at once become a vision, a gesture, an emotion, and that means you are not playing notes anymore. There is only one way for the magic to happen and requires that everything is ready in place, solid in your fingers, clear in your heart, and you, the performer, must be free of concerns.

No doubt it is hard, but there isn’t any more valuable route in music. As listeners, for music to reach out and move us, it must be really a special mixture of unique qualities. For musicians the process is backwards: we first try figure out what is it that we are trying to say, why this music matter for us, what is the composer telling us, and keep trying until the exact balance of ingredients (gestures, ideas, visions, intentions, etc.) emerges to align in a perfect, magical mixture.

Alberto Ferro is a composer and pianist. Current Creative Director at the London Contemporary School of Piano, Alberto holds a Piano Performance Degree from Milan Conservatory and a Master in Music from Washington State University, U.S.

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It’s still quite unusual these days to attend a concert where the programme begins with a quiet and/or slow piece. Often performers have a favourite “warm up” piece, one with which they feel very comfortable, which is a helpful way to ease into the main programme, warm up the fingers and settle in for the concert. For some performers, a Prelude and Fugue by Bach, or something similar, is a good opener.

I recently attended a concert where the pianist began his programme (which included Beethoven’s heavenly penultimate piano sonata, the Op 110, and closed with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue) with two very quiet, very slow sonatas by Scarlatti. It helped that the pianist in question can produce the most poetic sound (at any dynamic) on the piano, but there was something about the intimacy and muted sounds of this music that made for a very concentrated listening experience.

In fact, I think beginning a concert in this way is a stroke of genius as it can create an immediate sense of intimacy and focus. The audience is forced to listen closely and pay attention to the nuances of the music – a very effective way of drawing the audience in and engaging them with the performance, and ensuring their attention for the remainder of the concert. Opening with a quiet piece or pieces can also create a sense of anticipation and expectation: the audience may be more likely to be attentive and engaged if they are waiting for something to happen. This can be particularly powerful in a concert setting where the audience is large or the venue is imposing, as it can help to create a sense of connection and shared experience.

A quiet piece can be a very effective way of setting the tone for the entire concert and can establish a mood and atmosphere that will carry through the entire concert. This can be especially effective if the quiet piece is followed by more up-tempo or energetic pieces and the contrast can be very effective in creating a dynamic and varied performance. Beginning with a quiet piece can be a bold and unexpected choice, challenging the audience’s expectations and encouraging them to approach the performance with an open mind.

Finally, starting with a quiet piece can be a very effective way of showcasing the performer’s skill. It’s not easy to perform a quiet piece effectively, and is a real demonstration of the performer’s control, sensitivity, and expressiveness. This can be especially powerful if the performer is able to create a sense of intimacy and connection with the audience.

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