Olivier Messiaen at 100 at Symphony Space

From NYTimes.com:

Olivier Messiaen’s centenary celebrations have made his music more plentiful than usual this season, but it’s not as if his works were neglected at other times. Organists play his challenging, visionary music regularly, and if the orchestral works could stand greater exposure, the chamber and vocal scores have become staples both in concert halls and on recordings. Certainly his “Quartet for the End of Time” (1941) is regarded as a modernist classic with a berth in the standard canon.

The quartet was a pillar of “Olivier Messiaen at 100,” a centenary tribute at Symphony Space on Thursday evening that included another major score, the otherworldly “Visions de l’Amen” (1943). Both are steeped in the Roman Catholic mystical imagery that informed virtually every note Messiaen composed, and both are exquisite examples of his idiosyncratic, wholly expressive style, in which dissonant harmonies are matched with melodies drawn from bird song and Indonesian gamelan music.

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