Embracing Messiaen
It’s anything but a workaday Messiaen Centenary event. The Messiaen Illuminated Festival, which takes over San Francisco’s Old First Church on November 15, includes three full concert programs, a visual art exhibit, artist receptions, and a hands-on demonstration of Messiaen’s beloved electronic instrument, the ondes Martenot. By programming the music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) side-by-side with compositions by his teachers, contemporaries, and several generations of students, ChamberBridge promises to instill a love for Messiaen’s otherworldly music and a deeper understanding of its role in the evolution of contemporary musical understanding.
Lara Bruckmann and Eva-Maria Zimmermann
Messiaen Illuminated is the brainchild of soprano Lara Bruckmann and pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann, who perform together as ChamberBridge. The two women met at the 2006 Other Minds Festival of Contemporary Music, where Zimmermann heard Bruckmann solo with the superb vocal ensemble Volti (before her four-year tenure was interrupted by her current pregnancy). Zimmermann, who is far more attracted to the intimate worlds of chamber performance and art song than to grand symphonies and opera, was delighted to discover a soprano who shared her interests.
“Even though I love performing and creating characters,” Bruckmann explained in a joint in-person interview, “I’ve always gotten a lot out of the intimacy of chamber music. I like working with smaller forces that have more say in where the music goes. It’s also scary, because you have to let all the personalities do what they want to do, which is not always what is expected.”
From the start, Zimmermann had a Messiaen festival in her sights. Once Bruckmann came on board, it soon grew into what she terms “a monster that started lumbering around our house.”
“Once Lara joined in,” confirms Zimmermann, “ideas started to explode. We realized we needed to start up an organization and do all the administrative work. Then we decided to include some of Messiaen’s music in our other programs. That enabled us to try out pieces beforehand. It’s such complicated music that we really wanted to gain a deeper understanding through multiple performances.”
In His Own World
When asked why they are so attracted to Messiaen’s music, Zimmermann marveled, “Messiaen sounds like nothing else. He is so much his own world.
Olivier Messiaen
“When I first heard his music, I felt like it was mine. I felt the same thing when I first heard Schubert. I thought, ‘Wow! Classical music can sound like that?’ Messiaen’s music was like from another world. I was so totally fascinated by the modes he uses that I wrote a paper about them when I was in Conservatory in Bern in Switzerland. But I never dared play his music. I thought it was too hard.”
Bruckmann first encountered Messiaen’s vocal music when she was an undergraduate at Rice. On hearing a grad student sing part of Messiaen’s Poème pour Mi, she said to herself, “Wow! I want to sing that!”
“Messiaen creates a vocally gorgeous, spiritually transporting sound world,” she says. “I thought it was incredible and really cool, but I didn’t yet have the lungs and technique to sing it. I even tried a little when I was in school at the New England Conservatory of Music. It wasn’t until I recovered from grad school, went through being an actor and cabaret singer, and began to think about the festival with Eva-Maria, that I discovered that the voice was ready.”
Both women are aware that many music lovers consider much 20th-century repertoire forbidding. “They fear their brain will be entertained, but not their heart and soul,” says Bruckmann. “If people have to think about music in order to be moved, they question why they should bother to listen. But Messiaen’s music can be approached simultaneously from intellectual, spiritual, and visceral angles. It has an inherent beauty that lies atop a uniquely powerful, intellectually compelling structure.”
To help listeners enter Messiaen’s universe, Zimmermann will play two of Messiaen’s solo preludes for piano. “In those,” she says, “I almost feel like I’m being played by the music. It just comes alive by itself. There’s also a very short piece for string quartet and piano where, in the middle, I only play the sound of a bird. It’s really fun just to be that bird.”
“There’s something unique about how Messiaen’s line finds its own path,” says Bruckmann. “You can feel how many times the chord needs to repeat before the next chord has to happen. There are these wild overtones that bounce around. Part of what is so compelling is the space between the attacks.”
Claude Debussy
That fascination led the duo to Debussy’s gorgeous Chansons de Bilitis, as well as to music by Messiaen students Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. All three composers explore how overtone decay affects the listener.
“It’s like Wagnerian opera,” says Bruckmann. “You just have to give up, and let him tell you what language we’re speaking. Then you emerge having learned a new language. Composers such as Messiaen, Debussy, and others on the program can say, ‘This is your universe now, this is your world.’ They say it so convincingly that you’re willing to go there with them.”
Messiaen Illuminated’s three programs include works by 15 composers; one is an American premiere, and two are world premieres. The youngest composer, 35-year-old Mei-Fang Lin, received a commission from ChamberBridge for a new work. Performers, in addition to the duo, include Bruckmann’s oboist brother Kyle, violinist Kate Stenberg, Edmund Campion (manning the computer in his own piece), violists Graeme Jennings and Charlton Lee (Zimmermann’s husband), flautist Diane Grubbe, the sfSoundGroup, and the Del Sol String Quartet. Complete information about this delicious festival may be found at www.chamberbridge.org.
Jason Victor Serinus writes about music for Opera News, Opera Now, American Record Guide, Stereophile, San Francisco Magazine, Muso, Carnegie Hall Playbill, East Bay Express, East Bay Monthly, San Francisco Examiner, Bay Area Reporter, hometheaterhifi.com, and other publications.
©2008 By Jason Victor Serinus, all rights reserved.