Messiaen’s La transfiguration (1965-9) marked a return to large-scale composition after the more concentrated scores of his middle years. It also enshrined that rediscovery of consonant harmony found to varying degrees in all his subsequent works, and the composer’s evident desire to bring together his most personal features of style – bird-song-derived arabesques for piano and high woodwind, percussion-grounded processionals based on oriental rhythmic patterns, and chant-like melodies enriched by modal, chorale-like harmony – makes this a key piece for anyone seeking the essence of Messiaen.
Reviewers of the first recording of La transfiguration (Decca, 5/74, conducted by Dorati – nla) were divided as to the merits of the work. This new recording makes a strong case for it, with Rickenbacher and his well-trained forces underlining those respects in which the second of the two seven-movement parts has greater tension and variety than the first. An added virtue, for me, is that the music of these later stages does not renounce all reference to that tougher, more genuinely intense style employed by the composer in a middle-period score like Chronochromie. There’s no shortage of those rapt, swooning melodies that the younger Messiaen tended to assign to the ondes martenot, but we are never allowed to forget that, to the Catholic believer, the Transfiguration was not just something to contemplate with reverential awe, but a mind-boggling drama that changed the course of human history.
The effectiveness of this performance owes much to the spacious yet scrupulously balanced sound, and the presence of Yvonne Loriod (who also took part in the earlier recording) provides a further guarantee of an authentic spirit. I was less persuaded by Rickenbacher’s approach to Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. Koch Schwann’s decision to present the five movements as a single track rather underlines the slowness of the proceedings. Written immediately before La transfiguration, it has passages which are – even for Messiaen – unusually static, and forms which are unusually repetitive. Nor do the woodwind players in this performance always pay sufficiently close attention to the dynamic contrasts in the score. The main, and very considerable virtue of these discs, then, is that they restore one of Messiaen’s most imposing and characteristic works to circulation, and this performance will be hard to beat.'