Re: suche eine werkbeschreibung

Hallo Friedrich,

hier ein Auszug aus der Kritik (aus dem englischen Magazin "The Gramophone") zur Ersteinspielung des Werks unter Antoni Wit und dem Polnischen Radio-Sinfonieorchester.

Messiaen must have planned Eclairs as his last work. It is almost a summary, musical and spiritual, of the preoccupations of his preceding 60 years but, inspiritingly enough, shows him delightedly discovering not only new birds (the
brazenly magnificent cry of Menura novaehollandiae, the appropriately named Superb Lyrebird, seen by Messiaen quite characteristically as an image of the
Bride in the Book of Revelation adorning herself) but also entrancingly new
sounds: he has not, I think, made such startling use before of the contrabass clarinet (in the huge and complex eighth movement, which culminates in a Great
Messiaen Tune of sonorous nobility), nor employed (to evoke the Lyrebird) such vertiginous leaps between sections of the orchestra. In one way, then, it is a series of nostalgic revisits. In the fourth movement, for example, there's a sort of
two-minute summary of the extremely dense counterpoint of Chronochromie; the sixth recalls the "Dance of fury for the seven trumpets" in the Quartet for the end of time. But there's also a touching sense of Messiaen in his eighties
preparing to contemplate the beyond. In the ninth of the 11 movements he writes his last birdsong piece, no fewer that 25 birds impersonated simultaneously by 18 woodwind instruments: the image is of Christ as the Tree of Life, the birds are
the souls of the blessed, and of course they are all singing at once. He then considers "The path to the invisible", and if we were expecting a rapt meditation we do not know Messiaen: it is a clamorous and insistent piece, one of his great
angular toccatas, expressing the very difficulty of keeping to that path. And finally, most movingly, one of his almost motionless, beginningless and endless string chorales, "Christ, Light of Paradise"; Olivier Messiaen, in a phrase quoted
on the opening page of the accompanying booklet (doubtless at the suggestion of his widow Yvonne Loriod, who wrote the notes for the recording and agreed to
its release) beginning "gradually to understand the Invisible".

On the way to that luminous final page there are many wonderful sounds and characteristic juxtapositions and superimpositions. Whether it all adds up to a final masterpiece I'm not yet sure, but I rather suspect so.

Gruss

Darius
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