In a composing career full of magnum opuses, Messiaen’s only opera, eight years in the writing, occupies a special place. DG is right to claim this set as one of the Yellow Label’s most prestigious and exciting projects in years, wrong to portray the piece as some sort of instant classic. Indeed, such were the perceived problems (not least the composer’s insistence on a literal interpretation of his intractable stage directions) that the original 1983 Paris production (Cybelia, 12/88) was never revived. Seiji Ozawa persisted with concert performances of extracts, as heard in London with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau replacing Jose van Dam in the title-role. Kent Nagano, Ozawa’s assistant in Paris, conducted several more (including one for KRO Hilversum); he also directed a memorable 80th birthday concert for the composer in London’s Royal Festival Hall: David Wilson-Johnson was the protagonist on that occasion. The breakthrough came with the Salzburg Festival production unveiled in August 1992, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting. Van Dam and his monks still wore habits, but Peter Sellars’s production concept broke with the composer’s ‘realistic’ Umbrian spectacle to put Dawn Upshaw’s Angel in a grey business suit, while his trademark video monitors relayed associated imagery. He even invented a second Angel, one who doesn’t exist in the score, an Angel who dances and mimes.
Nagano took up the reins for the 1998 Salzburg revival as captured here in DG’s live recording, and there is no mistaking the remarkable authority and technical self-confidence of the results. Van Dam’s definitive Saint Francois is a remarkable achievement for an artist on the cusp of his sixth decade and his identification with the role is profound. Upshaw too is well cast, with just enough tonal weight to underpin her fresh, ardent, mobile singing. It’s mostly plain sailing in the subsidiary roles, although Urban Malmberg’s French is still as dodgy as the choir’s. The hard-pressed musicians of the Halle have been drilled to the peak of perfection, closely scrutinized by vivid, upfront sound that does not always give their glittering sonorities a natural perspective in which to expand. Above all, the set is a triumph for them. Their outgoing chief has come in for some criticism recently. He cannot swing a Bernstein tune to save his life, but there is no mistaking his love of and identification with these ‘Franciscan Scenes’.
Perhaps he is helped by the fact that so much of the idiom sounds less eccentric than it did 16 years ago. We are surrounded by somnambulistic religious composers these days, although few have demonstrated Messiaen’s ability to establish an unmistakably individual sound world. That’s what is so heartening about this mammoth score. Living on into a post-modern old age, Messiaen embraced the era’s multiplicity of means while remaining entirely true to himself. He shows us that it is, after all, possible to compose music that is easy to follow without retreating from contemporary modes of expression.
All Messiaen’s trademarks are here: the birdsong, the modal rigour (especially for the word setting which is crystal clear), the common or garden triads given new harmonic context and heft, the post-Stravinskian dances. There are also distant echoes of Boris Godunov and Pelleas et Melisande. Uninitiated listeners should perhaps try Act 1 scene 3 – the curing of the leper – where Messiaen’s mosaic construction permits a breathtaking conjunction of ideas from timeless chant through 1960s modernism, to childlike eruptions of joy and premonitions of holy minimalism. Even here, there is only limited dramatic conflict, no development of character as conventionally understood. And yet it scarcely matters so long as you can leave your preconceptions behind and accept Messiaen’s ecstatic tableaux as you would the stained-glass windows of a great cathedral. Saint Francois d’Assise can make Parsifal seem like an intermezzo, but it exerts a uniquely hypnotic spell. Strongly recommended.'