Ashley Grote's performance of Oliver Messiaen NNF 2024
Oliver Messiaen's compositions are challenging. Certainly, they are distinctive and innovative, but can none the less be hard to immediately grapple with, the intensity of their profound religiosity a shock to the system. But what, after all, is a festival for, if not to test your boundaries?
N&N Festival
Preparations for Ashley Grote's performance of Oliver Messiaen’s early Organ works have, in a sense, being going on for ten years. The Cathedral's organ was originally built in the nineteenth century, and having literally gone through the wars, was showing its age. Having recently completed its first rebuild since the early forties, the Messiaen concert was the first opportunity to showcase its refurbishment within the context of the Norwich and Norwich Festival.
In a masterstroke of crafty programming, Grote's performance was the second of two in the Cathedral, taking the audience from the smallest of instruments, the humble recorder, to the very grandest - a hundred stop, six thousand pipe cathedral organ. Was it on purpose, or just a happy accident, that both artists found inspiration in the music of birdsong? A full review of Laura Cannell's performance can be found elsewhere on Outline - suffice to say that it provided an evocative contrast to the challenging music of one of the foremost composers of twentieth century organ music.
Screens had been erected so we could see how Ashley Grote's was producing an extraordinary variety of sound, his hands and feet in astonishing symbiosis with the machinery he was operating - instrument somehow being too small a word for a device that at times seemed to defy rational analysis. Initially, I found this fascinating, marvelling at the skill demonstrated. It some respects, however, it was a peek behind the wizard's curtain I could done without. Such was the majesty of the sound produced, and such was the magnificence to its surroundings, a bit of me wishes the means of production had remained a mystery.
Nonetheless, considerable credit is due to the festival, and no doubt the Cathedral, for opting for Messiaen in the first place. One might have expected Handel's Zadok, or a Toccata from Bach or Widor, on the opening weekend of the festival. I'm sure I'm not the only one that would have been very happy with the accessibility of any of the above. Oliver Messiaen's compositions are altogether more challenging. Certainly, they are distinctive and innovative, but can none the less be hard to immediately grapple with, the intensity of their profound religiosity a shock to the system. But what, after all, is a festival for, if not to test your boundaries?
I therefore buckled up and strapped myself in for Apparition de legalise Eternally, an early work that exploits the dramatic power of the organ to hair raising effect, and I confess to being transported in a way no other instrument can quite match. By way of contrast, parts of Diptyque demonstrated the delicacy and quietude of a flute melody in such a way that created a disconnect in the mind’s eye between the leviathan of the organ's appearance, and the musicality of the newly minted sound it was capable of producing. It was in the third piece, L'Ascension, where these contrasting sounds came together most effectively, fully legitimising the choice of Messiaen's music to demonstrate the breadth and depth of what the new organ is capable of. I’d be fibbing if I said I was completely on board with monumental, quasi-mysticism of the Frenchman’s music, which to my mind too often confuses bombast with significance, but if you want to stress test your organ, it certainly pulled out the stops.
