Page 527 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

11 June 2024

JOURNAL – FINALLY GETTING MESSIAEN

11TH JUNE 2024

On Saturday, Gweneth Ann Rand performed the first of two Messiaen song cycles at the
Aldeburgh Festival. This deeply moving event had a profound effect. In truth, I don’t feel
equipped to review it fully, as the work is complex and entirely new to me. Properly
analysing it would require more time spent researching than the performance itself. Yet
documenting this experience, is essential—it goes to the heart of what Thoroughly Good is
about.

Messiaen’s Harawi Song Cycle is a technicolour exploration of loss and grief manifest in
fiendish writing for both pianist and soprano. It’s deep, challenging and highly
unconventional it’s in musical language. Yet, it is a beguiling work, both unsettling in the
language it uses and consoling at the same time. It is this paradox that illustrates how
classical can when it’s least expected have a profoundly transformative effect.

Written in 1946 five years after Messiaen composed Quartet for the End of Time whilst a
PoW in Nazi Germany, Harawi is only a few older than the Aldeburgh Festival and Arts
Council, both institutions established when art was undergoing considerable innovation.

The establishment of Festivals like Aldeburgh (the performance formed part of the opening
weekend for the 75th Festival) and Edinburgh capitalised on a renewed enthusiasm for
classical, opera and the wider arts. Both Festivals continue to demonstrate the founding spirit
and and an ongoing commitment to platform important works as well as driving innovation.
It’s somewhere like Aldeburgh you’re most likely to hear the niche and unfamiliar.

Harawi like many other works of the period represents the innovation admired by artists of
the time that led to the establishment of institutions like Aldeburgh and the Arts Council that
bridged the gap between innovation and audiences, and helped secure interest for them
amongst future generations.

We hear it now because of the passionate advocacy of artists then, a thought that resonates
throughout the performance at Aldeburgh on Saturday. The constantly shifting multimedia
artwork adorning the back wall of the Britten Studio (Rachel Jones and Cynthia Igbokwe
artwork

Ben Smalley animation), added a new perspective to the work too: art building on art.

The music is heady, intoxicating and, quite unexpectedly I hear romanticism amid the intense
rhythmic and harmonic complexity. I hear Turangalila Symphony in places – clusters of
chords, decorative lines at the top of the piano and notes full of portent at the bottom. It is