Celebrating Kent Nagano’s 70th Birthday

courtesy of Naxos of America

Two weeks from today, conductor Kent Nagano will celebrate his 70th birthday. He was born in Berkeley on November 22, 1951. He became a major presence among those that take listening to music seriously here in the Bay Area, particularly after he became the conductor of the Berkeley Symphony in 1978. He used that position as a “bully pulpit” to champion the music of Olivier Messiaen.

His success advanced his reputation far beyond Berkeley, taking him to Paris in 1982 to work with Messiaen on the final stages of the opera, Saint François d'Assise. The premiere took place at the Palais Garnier in Paris on November 28, 1983. Nagano would conduct a full production for the first time in August of 1998 at the Salzburg Festival; and Deutsche Grammophon subsequently released a live recording as part of its 20/21 music of our time series.

It therefore seems appropriate to celebrate Nagano’s landmark birthday with a new recording of his interpretations of Messiaen’s music. That recording was released at the beginning of last month as a three-CD set. These are again live recordings, made this time in June of 2017, July of 2018, and February of 2019. They were all made in Munich during concerts when Nagano conducted the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The first two CDs present a complete performance of Messiaen’s oratorio La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (the transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ), recorded in 2017. The third CD begins with the orchestral version of both books of the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi (poems for Mi), which Messiaen dedicated to his first wife Claire Delbos, recorded in 2019. The vocalist is Jenny Daviet. The CD then concludes with the 2018 recording of the tone poem “Chronochromie” (time-color).

The song cycle, first written for piano and voice in the summer of 1936 and orchestrated the following year, is one of Messiaen’s earliest full-orchestra compositions. The texts are his own paraphrases of verses from the New Testament, and the music finds him exploring alternatives to the approaches to composition that he had encountered during his studies at the Conservatoire de Paris. These included rhythms and modes based on ancient Greek practices and Hindu rhythms. In many respects this is the “ground floor” of the grammatical and rhetorical foundations that would guide Messiaen’s innovative approaches to composition after World War II.

“Chronochromie” was completed in 1960. This has become one of his more frequently performed orchestral compositions, representative of his efforts to depict the diversity of natural resources through music. The resource that interested him the most was birdsong; and the penultimate movement of this piece involves eighteen different birdsongs, played simultaneously by a different solo string instrument for each bird.

For many of us, “Chronochromie” was a tough nut to crack when we first encountered it. In my case it was a performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra by Antal Dorati on what was then the Angel label. It took quite some time for me to get beyond the usual listening expectations of devices such as recapitulation and cadences, even in the absence of a tonal center. The necessary shift in my approach to listening came when I realized that the Catalogue d'oiseaux was just that, an extended project of efforts to reproduce the songs of thirteen different birds through music for solo piano. Messiaen did not ask anything more of the listener than to follow his journey from one bird to the next.

In a similar vein La Transfiguration, composed between 1965 and 1969, is basically an act of incantation. This is one of Messiaen’s grandest undertakings, requiring around 200 performers. Like “Chronochromie,” the score makes full use of a large orchestra. However, there are also solo parts for seven instrumentalists, two vocalists, and a large mixed choir. Once again birdsong figures in the instrumental music, while the vocal parts tend to be structured around different styles of chant. In the context of the new Nagano album, it is worth nothing that he gave this composition its West Coast premiere, conducting the Berkeley Symphony and the Contra Costa Chorale. Furthermore, Messiaen was in California at the time to supervise Nagano’s efforts.

In that context this particular selection serves as a reflection on Nagano’s first encounter with La Transfiguration. The other two compositions can then be taken as context for that encounter. From that point of view, listeners might do well to begin their listening with the two earlier compositions on the third CD, holding off on the two CDs for La Transfiguration until both ears and mind are prepared for the experience.