La Fauvette Passerinette: a Messiaen premiere, with birds, landscapes & homages CD Booklet

La Fauvette Passerinette a Messiaen premiere

with birds, landscapes & homages

Peter Hill

La Fauvette Passerinette: a Messiaen premiere

Peter Hill

PRELUDE

BIRDS & LANDSCAPES

with birds, landscapes & homages

1

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Oiseaux tristes

[4:22]

9

piano

Olivier Messiaen

No 2 from Miroirs (1904–5) 2

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)

La Colombe

[2:19]

10

Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013)

No 1 from Huit Préludes (1928–9) 3

Olivier Messiaen

Le Traquet stapazin

[13:55]

No 4 (Book 2) from Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–8)

Pièce pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas (1935)

D’ombre et de silence

[3:48]

No 1 from Trois Préludes (1973–88)

[1:58]

11

Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014)

Stars

[1:39]

from Night Pieces (1972–3) 12

ÉTUDE 4

Olivier Messiaen

Île de feu 1

[2:05]

5

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007)

Klavierstück VII (1954)

[6:31]

6

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Klavierstück VIII (1954)

[1:59]

Julian Anderson (b. 1967)

Etude No 1

[0:44]

13

George Benjamin (b. 1960)

[6:07]

Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm

[12:20]

Olivier Messiaen

La Fauvette passerinette (1961)*

[11:00]

MEMORIAL 14

Tristan Murail (b. 1947)

Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire… (in memoriam Olivier Messiaen) (1992)

[4:22]

15

Tōru Takemitsu (1930–1996)

Rain Tree Sketch II (1992)

[3:41]

Morceau de lecture à vue (1934)

[1:57]

from Etudes for piano (1995–) 8

River from Dreamlandscapes, Book 2 (1977–85)

No 1 from Quatre Études de rythme (1949–50)

7

Douglas Young (b. 1947)

No 1 from Three Studies for solo piano (1982–5) POSTLUDE 16 Recorded on 23 March & 6 April 2014 in the Reid Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Piano: Steinway model D, 2012, serial no. 592403

Piano technician: Norman W. Motion Cover photograph: Messiaen transcribing birdsong at Bryce Canyon, Utah (Photo: Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen) Cover & booklet design: John Christ Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk

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Olivier Messiaen Total playing time

* premiere recording

[78:56]

A Messiaen premiere, with birds, landscapes and homages In 2012, while working on Messiaen’s sketches, I came across several pages of what seemed to be finished music, in rapid and decisive handwriting, though very hard to read in Messiaen’s preferred working medium of faint pencil. Looking closely, I realised with growing excitement that this was a draft score of an unknown composition, the music based on birdsong (as was much of Messiaen’s piano music), but birdsong in a new way, with features that are unique in Messiaen’s output.

The manuscript appeared to be in an advanced state of completion, and was evidently considered so by Messiaen, who at one point reminds himself to make a fair copy. Another note in the margin dates composition to August 1961 at Petichet, Messiaen’s summer retreat in the French Alps.

Until this discovery it has been puzzling that Messiaen composed nothing in 1961. It now seems likely that he used this fallow year for planning a second cycle of piano pieces to follow the earlier Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–8).

La Fauvette passerinette (the bird named in the title is the ‘subalpine warbler’, Sylvia cantillans) shows important differences, however. Where in the Catalogue the harmonic structure of each piece comes from evocations of place – the sea, mountains, trees reflected in a river – Messiaen’s new approach is more abstract, working only with the birdsong itself, apart from a few background colour chords. Since

the birdsong has to create its own harmony, the writing is richer than in the Catalogue, a stepping stone to the birdsong style in La Fauvette des jardins (1970) and to the fabulous refinement of birdsong, through harmony and instrumentation, in the opera Saint François d’Assise (1975–83).

Another consequence of creating his structure from birdsong alone is that Messiaen uses the birds to confront or imitate one another, in a kaleidoscopic juggling of their characteristics: near/far, similar/dissimilar, active/passive, fluid/static. The most prominent innovation is the sense of development. The solos for the fauvette passerinette undergo a transformation: they begin in a lyrical style that becomes increasingly hard-edged, developing in a purposeful way that absorbs motifs from the songs of other birds that share its habitat. As a result, the final section is both a virtuoso finale – a thrilling toccata that rampages towards the finish – and a recapitulation that sums up the birdsongs heard in the piece.

The main difficulty in realising Messiaen’s sketch was deciphering his handwriting: the manuscript is in spidery pencil, though always meticulous in detail. The outer sections of the piece – which feature the song of the soloist – are entirely finished, down to details of pedalling and even fingering. The middle is more fragmentary and required a certain

amount of detective work. The order of events was determined by following Messiaen’s alphabetically laid-out scheme; and I was able to supply missing dynamics or marks of articulation by consulting Messiaen’s birdsong notebooks which contain the transcriptions on which the music is closely based: these were the only additions I made.

The disappearance of La Fauvette passerinette is understandable. By the end of 1961 Messiaen was occupied with plans for an orchestral work for Debussy’s centenary the following year, and soon afterwards three more commissions came his way, for Couleurs de la Cité céleste (1963), Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964) and La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1965–9). The second ‘catalogue of birds’ was never fulfilled, and La Fauvette passerinette was put away and forgotten.

I wanted to give a context to the newlydiscovered piece by recording it alongside other works by Messiaen showing developments in his music up to 1961. These are further interleaved with works by nine other composers – a survey of the musical landscape that Messiaen did so much to inspire with his music and to nurture through his teaching. All the composers have something in common with Messiaen, or owe something to his example. Three were at different times

students in Messiaen’s class (Stockhausen, Tristan Murail and George Benjamin), while Takemitsu studied with him informally.

Only very rarely does the music sound like Messiaen, however. As George Benjamin recalled, Messiaen would have been horrified if a student had imitated his style: ‘He wanted to guide you to find your own voice and to strengthen your own gifts. In fact he would only be stylistically censorious (although that is too strong a word) if he saw you were overinfluenced by his musical world.’

I met the same generosity when I worked with Messiaen in Paris in the late 1980s while I was preparing my recording of his piano music.

Like George Benjamin I found him kindly and encouraging, though all mildness disappeared when it came to his own music, as I recorded in my diary after our first meeting: Altogether an absolutely passionate (not ‘abstract’) musician: everything has to be 100 per cent, and really be the birds, places, etc.

Messiaen set the highest standards, but he encouraged my own convictions about his music, rarely imposing his own. The revelations came in the details. It was inspiring just to hear him play a few chords on the piano, scrutinising the effect of altering the balance to change the colour – literally so for Messiaen, who ‘saw’ and experienced harmonies as colours.

A Messiaen premiere, with birds, landscapes and homages Prelude

This sensitivity to sound is apparent in Messiaen’s earliest compositions, absorbed from the music he got to know in his childhood and teens. Messiaen played Ravel’s piano music as a child, and frequently discussed Ravel with his students.1 He paid musical homage to Oiseaux tristes (from Ravel’s suite Miroirs) in ‘Le Courlis cendré’, the final piece of Catalogue d’oiseaux, setting the call of the curlew – marked flûté, triste – against widely spaced triads that recall the sombre E flat minor sonorities of the Ravel. According to Ravel, Oiseaux tristes ‘evokes birds lost in the oppressiveness of a very dark forest during the hottest hours of summer’. The inspiration was a real birdsong, that of a blackbird heard in the forest of Fontainebleau, its song an ‘elegant, melancholy arabesque’.

By his late teens Messiaen had found a language unmistakably his own. Partly this stems from the interaction between tonality and the system of modes that Messiaen was evolving. La Colombe (The Dove) begins with a texture in three layers. The lowest sustains the harmony of E major, while the fluttering descant derives from the octatonic scale that Messiaen would later codify as ‘mode 2’, 1 A modest collection of Messiaen’s analyses was published posthumously – see Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne LoriodMessiaen, Ravel: Analyses des œuvres pour piano de Maurice Ravel (Durand, 2004).

a pattern of alternating semitones and tones (E, F, G, G sharp, etc.). In between, the melody outlines E major, inflected expressively by notes foreign to the key but found in the mode: F natural, A sharp, D natural. The coda is exquisite, with its melodic reminiscence coloured by a softer parallel line, two octaves minus a semitone higher.

La Colombe was Messiaen’s first evocation of a bird, composed while still a student of Paul Dukas at the Paris Conservatoire, the first in a set of eight Préludes that were published in 1930 after Dukas had recommended the work to his publisher Durand. Pièce pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas appeared in the Revue musicale of May/June 1936, in a memorial collection (or ‘tombeau’) for Dukas, who had died the previous year. Among graceful musical tributes by Falla, Rodrigo, Schmitt and others, Messiaen’s sits granitic and uncompromising, seeming to rage at the dying of the light. The powerful harmonies include an early instance of a favourite sequence, with rich chords shifting over a common bass note (the ‘accords des renversements transposés’), heard again on this CD in the dawn and sunset music of Le Traquet stapazin, and again as a cadence pattern in La Fauvette passerinette. ÉTUDE

It was possibly through the influence of his students that Messiaen started to take an

interest in serialism. As early as 1945 an entry in his diary speculates on applying serial organisation to tempo; later he planned a ballet on Time, in which all the musical parameters would be derived from a single ‘serial theme’.

The catalyst for putting these ideas into effect came in 1949 with the sharp decline in health of Messiaen’s first wife Claire. Plans for an opera were shelved, and Messiaen embarked on a series of short pieces for the instruments he himself played, piano and organ. The drive to renew his language was conscious: ‘Look for melodic motifs, chords, rhythmic figures from beyond my language, make myself a little dictionary.’

The first of the Quatre Études de rythme to be composed was ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, an experiment in organising not only pitch but also duration, dynamic, and even types of attack (accent, legato, etc.) through serial means. Île de feu 1 was the last of the studies to be written, in the summer of 1950.

The ‘isle of fire’ of the title is Papua New Guinea, and the piece is structured around a succession of refrains based on a Papuan folksong, which is heard first against percussive bass clusters, then a descant of birdsong, further variations being interleaved with tiny episodes of increasing virtuosity before finally exploding into an extended version of the theme against furious drumming. The development of such kaleidoscopic structures,

made up of brilliantly characterised and hardedged fragments, points forward to Messiaen’s birdsong style from the late 1950s onwards.

The Quatre Études were also an essential influence on a whole generation of younger composers who came to the fore in the 1950s.

Messiaen had made a recording of the études in May 1951, and it was played at the summer courses for young composers in Darmstadt that year, where it created a sensation. Among those who heard it was Karlheinz Stockhausen, then aged 22. The effect on Stockhausen’s music was immediate, and from the following January he spent 15 months in Paris, dividing his time between Messiaen’s class at the Paris Conservatoire and the studios of Pierre Schaeffer and Radio France, where he made his first experiments in tape music. Stockhausen then applied his researches to the piano, soon adding a second and third set of Klavierstücke (the second set numbering V to X; the third ‘set’ is a single large piece, Klavierstück XI) to the four short piano studies of his own he had composed while studying with Messiaen.

The middle two pieces of the second set were intended by Stockhausen to be played as a pair, and are presented as such here.

Klavierstück VII is a study in harmonics, the pianist depressing selected notes silently, enabling sympathetic resonances that are touched off by sharp points of sound, before

A Messiaen premiere, with birds, landscapes and homages gradually dispersing as notes are released.

Other ‘shadow’ sonorities are explored through the use of half pedal, or by catching the echo of a staccato just before it fades into silence.

In Klavierstück VIII the points are set within lines which range all over the keyboard, so that the piece becomes a study for the pianist in articulating the full spectrum of dynamics while at the same time giving a sense of linear counterpoint. The compressed energy erupts into flurries of grace notes that mark off each tiny section. The ending unravels beautifully from a penultimate line where the points of sound are most densely interwoven.

Julian Anderson’s Etude No 1 was composed with the exhilarating complexities of Klavierstück VIII and Messiaen’s Études in mind. But instead of their sectional designs Anderson’s piece follows a linear course, compressing teeming incident into barely 35 seconds. The music starts with left and right hands competing in a tangle of rhythms, before fanning outwards. Huge chords block the way, the escape coming by way of a rapid prestissimo scale that vanishes off the end of the keyboard.

George Benjamin studied in the class at the Conservatoire from 1976 until Messiaen’s retirement in the summer of 1978. The schedule for the autumn term in 1976 shows the eclectic nature of Messiaen’s teaching.

As well as student compositions, he discussed works by Boulez, Ligeti, Ohana and Xenakis, songs by Schubert, Wagner’s Das Rheingold, together with favourite topics from his teaching repertoire, Claude Le Jeune’s Le Printemps, plainchant and Greek metre.

Benjamin’s Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm – written in 1985, seven years after his studies with Messiaen – is anchored throughout to the short–long rhythmic figure suggested by the title, but treats this idée fixe with such imagination that the music avoids any sense of rigidity. The design is equally flexible, proceeding in waves rather than clear-cut sections. The opening (‘agile but calm’) is a sinuous exploration of iambic rhythm, accelerating into a rapid scherzando, with clipped rhythms in the left hand. A fugitive transition transforms the melody into a keening lament, leading to an extraordinary texture in the high treble, like crystalline shards, and after further turbulence to a cadenza. At this point the music alters course, building patiently from extreme quietness to a gigantic climax, engulfed in a hammered low B, ‘like a huge bell’. The final transformation is an inspired simplification, the iambic rhythm skipping evenly, almost like a folksong.

BIRDS & LANDSCAPES

As in Ravel’s Oiseaux tristes, the birdsong in Messiaen’s early music is stylised, for example the blackbird and nightingale at the

opening of the Quartet for the end of Time (1940–41). Messiaen signalled a change of direction when he went public for the first time about his birdsong researches in a newspaper interview in 1948. Then in 1952 a request from the Conservatoire for a test piece for flautists inspired a much more realistic blackbird in Le Merle noir, for flute and piano. Messiaen took advice from a noted ornithologist, Jacques Delamain, and from May 1952 began the birdsong notebooks (of which some 203 survive), the source for the birdsong passages in the music composed in the last 40 years of his life. Every spare moment was dedicated to birdsong research, out in the fields and forests of France, with birds from overseas studied from recordings. The first fruits of this research were two works for piano and orchestra, Réveil des oiseaux (1952–3) and Oiseaux exotiques (1955–6); but the great achievement of the 1950s was the epic piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux, which features a total of 77 species of birds whose songs were collected and transcribed by Messiaen on travels throughout France. Composition began in September 1956, and six of the eventual thirteen pieces were performed in March 1957 by Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s chosen interpreter of his piano music since the early 1940s. Le Traquet stapazin (Blackeared wheatear) comes from a second wave of composition that began in June 1957. By this point Messiaen’s musical response to

the natural world was so immediate that the boundary between research and composition had become blurred: much of ‘Le Traquet stapazin’ was composed on the clifftops of the Roussillon coast where the music is set.

The result is one of the masterpieces of the Catalogue, and a favourite of Messiaen himself: the birdsong integrated with its surroundings, as the music portrays the landscape of terraced vineyards, and the Mediterranean changing colour as the sun rises over the sea, and sets over the foothills of the Pyrenees.

The piece opens in the darkness before dawn with a medley of birdsongs, headed by the abrupt call of the wheatear, then the flute-like cadence of the ortolan bunting, and the more voluble spectacled warbler. Two variants of this opening follow, in each case with the birdsong developed. The central part of the piece begins with the sunrise, and as the light intensifies so too does the birdsong, described in Messiaen’s preface: ‘… the crystal fragments of the corn bunting, the mad exuberance of the rock bunting, the voluble melodious warbler – while, on the wing, the Thekla lark, its song exultant, thrilling, mingled with sharp cries.’ After a long silence the music of the opening resumes, again varied, with a brilliant duet for goldfinches.

The sun sets, and ‘cloaked in blood and gold, sinks behind the mountains. The sea darkens.

The sky turns from red to orange, then is stained violet, the colour of dreams … Final refrains of

A Messiaen premiere, with birds, landscapes and homages the spectacled warbler. In the darkening vines the three notes of the ortolan bunting. Harsh sniggers of a herring gull, far out over the dark sea. Silence … Ten o’clock. Nightfall. A faint echo of the spectacled warbler …’

Henri Dutilleux studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Jean Gallon, who earlier had taught harmony to Messiaen. D’ombre et de silence (1973) shares with Messiaen a common ancestry in Ravel, close in spirit to Oiseaux tristes. Oppressive clouds of sonority are dispelled by the release of successive keys (as in Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII). In the second half, the line ascends in layers of melody, the highest of which hovers bird-like over the abyss.

Peter Sculthorpe and Douglas Young share a fascination with gamelan, an influence that also runs deep in French music since the Javanese gamelan at the Exposition of 1889 enthralled Debussy, Ravel and Satie; Messiaen himself encountered a Balinese gamelan first-hand at the Exposition Coloniale in 1931. Sculthorpe’s interest came via the Canadian composer Colin McPhee, whose memoir A House in Bali he read as a young man, and the influence of gamelan can be heard in the Australian composer’s Sun Music III (1967) and Tabuh tabuhan (1968), the latter title borrowed from McPhee’s own Balinese-inspired orchestral work. The elegiac but intense quality of Sculthorpe’s music reflects his immersion in

the landscape and ancient culture of Australia.

Stars is the last of five miniatures for piano called Night Pieces; one can imagine in this music the vastness of the Australian desert, silent under the southern hemisphere sky. The texture again recalls gamelan, and the move from cool intricacy to the impassioned music of the final page parallels passages in Messiaen’s birdsong works, as the focus moves from outer reality to the composer’s inner emotions.

The development of Douglas Young’s music in the 1970s was from the early influences of Britten, Berg and Stravinsky towards a growing mastery of avant-garde techniques, and an interest in traditional music from Ireland, Africa, Sri Lanka and the Far East. Like Sculthorpe he made a study of the work of Colin McPhee, and as a pianist recorded McPhee’s Balinese Ceremonial Music. River (1977–9) begins seemingly in the sound-world of Ravel or Debussy, a major chord with added ninth. As the piece unfolds the chord is understood as part of a process, with patterns of expanding and contracting intervals heard both melodically and harmonically. The second section is an inversion of the first, shifted to the upper half of the keyboard, with middle C the ‘horizon’ in common. As with the Sculthorpe, the effect is of rigorous construction combined with an intense lyricism. River follows closely Apollinaire’s famous evocation of lost love, ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’:

Passent les jours et passent les semaines Ni temps passé Ni les amours reviennent Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine [Days and weeks pass Neither time nor past loves return Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine]

With the publication of Catalogue d’oiseaux, Messiaen’s scores became objects of beauty in their own right. Each piece in the Catalogue comes with a preface by Messiaen, a prosepoem that introduces the music in terms of its ornithology and landscape. The following is a preface to La Fauvette passerinette as Messiaen might have written it.

Hérault in May. The stony garrigue landscape near the village of Nizas. Blue sky, sun, warmth. The scents and colours of thyme, lavender, honeysuckle and wild roses. The fauvette passerinette (subalpine warbler) sings in a duet, with lyrical melismas interspersed with short motifs, repeated insistently, the timbre flute-like and metallic. Four chords introduce a medley: a pair of woodlark high in the sky, their song a liquid, chromatic descent; the alarm call of the red-backed shrike; the springy rhythms of the Orphean warbler. The chords return, with the song of the woodlark developed. Then a quiet sequence introduces the nightingale, with its distant moonlit harmonies, biting tremolos and explosive gestures.

Second duet for the passerinettes, enriched by harmonies, playful and with abrupt cadences.

Solos for the Sardinian warbler, a flock of great spotted cuckoos, and the Orphean warbler. Birds heard earlier are recalled, in each case with their songs developed. This central section opens with the alarm call of the Sardinian warbler. The phrases are more abrupt than those of the fauvette passerinette: furious! – with a metallic timbre and staccato cries mingled with the tremolo of maracas. The ending of its solo is quiet. Then another medley: the passerinette, nightingale (preceded, as before, by quiet chords), shrike, Orphean warbler, roller, and a swarm of wasps, in stuttering rhythms, reaching its zenith in the golden oriole, with its glowing E major harmonies, the sun at midday. The Sardinian warbler resumes, punctuated by the nightingale, with its song developed: again the ending is quiet. A flock of six great spotted cuckoos, high-pitched, screeching, powerful, discordant. A solo for the Orphean warbler, this time with richer harmonies.

Reprise of the fauvette passerinette. Fragmentary phrases coalesce into a toccata, absorbing motifs and harmonies for the other birdsongs. Brilliant, ecstatic, the fauvette passerinette soars heavenwards …

MEMORIAL

Tristan Murail studied with Messiaen from 1967 to 1972. With Gérard Grisey (another Messiaen pupil, who also studied with Dutilleux), Murail initiated the movement

A Messiaen premiere, with birds, landscapes and homages

Biography

later known as spectral music, exploring the relationship of rhythm, timbre and harmony to acoustics, perception, and instruments and their performance, subsequently continuing his research at IRCAM. Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire… (in memoriam Olivier Messiaen) refers to early and late works by Messiaen: Un sourire (1991) was composed by Messiaen for the bicentenary of Mozart, while the music’s bell sounds refer to ‘Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu’ (from the Préludes), whose final cadence is quoted at the end of Murail’s piece. The score is conceived with a spatial system of rhythmic notation that encourages the pianist to ‘place’ each event in response to the instrument and acoustic.

One of the leading British pianists of his generation, Peter Hill worked with Messiaen between 1986 and 1991 while recording the composer’s complete piano works. The series was described by the New York Times as ‘one of the most impressive solo recording projects of recent years’, and won Messiaen’s endorsement: ‘Beautiful technique, a true poet: I am a passionate admirer of Peter Hill’s playing.’ Both the Messiaen cycle and a recording of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern feature in 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die.

In 1951 Takemitsu helped found Jikken Kobo (‘experimental studio’), which gave the first performance in Japan of many of Messiaen’s works. Debussy and Messiaen were Takemitsu’s early influences, along with recurring themes of water, the Japanese garden, and the sounds and textures of traditional Japanese music. In 1975, with Messiaen’s encouragement, Takemitsu composed Quatrain using a solo quartet of the same instruments as Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Rain Tree Sketch II was composed in memory of Messiaen after the composer’s death in 1992; the title invokes the symbolism of the saman or ‘rain tree’, which folds its leaves when it rains, thus gathering

moisture which it continues to spread long after the rain has stopped. The outer sections move from an intricate treble sonority (‘celestially light’) to spacious harmonies over pianissimo bass notes, like softly struck gongs. The songlike centre of the piece recalls the style and tenderness of Messiaen’s earliest music.

POSTLUDE

It seems fitting to end with music that reflects Messiaen’s teaching. During the 1930s Messiaen was employed in a modest capacity to teach sight-reading at the École Normale de Musique. He must have composed hundreds of exercises for his students, but only this Morceau de lecture à vue (or ‘sight-reading piece’) survives, printed in a supplement to Le Monde musical in 1934; it is reproduced in Messiaen (Yale University Press, 2005). Messiaen’s long career was sustained by his sense of the sublime allied with his craftsman’s care for the smallest detail. It is characteristic of him that music for such a mundane purpose should be as profound and perfect as anything he ever wrote. © 2014 Peter Hill

Other CDs include Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen (with Benjamin Frith) and two CDs of Stravinsky, with the composer’s arrangements of The Rite of Spring and Three Movements from ‘Petrushka’. Hill’s recordings for Delphian of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier – two volumes, each comprising 2 CDs – have received outstanding reviews: Book 2 (Delphian DCD34101) was ‘CD of the Week’ on BBC Radio 3.

Writings include a book on Stravinsky (Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, Cambridge University Press) and three books on Messiaen, among them a groundbreaking biography (Messiaen, Yale University Press) which was awarded the Dumesnil Prize by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His research on Messiaen continues, and a book on Catalogue d’oiseaux is in preparation. As well as recitals, Peter Hill gives lectures and masterclasses around the world. He holds an honorary professorship at Sheffield University and is a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music.

Also available on Delphian J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One Peter Hill piano

Messiaen: Complete Organ Works Vol III Michael Bonaventure

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DCD34076 (2 discs)

A recognised authority in twentieth-century and contemporary music, Peter Hill turns for the first time on disc to another of his lifelong preoccupations: the music of J.S. Bach. In two new 2CD sets marking his new recording relationship with Delphian, Hill brings his customary scholarly acumen and crystalline musical intelligence to bear on the two books of preludes and fugues that comprise Bach’s immortal ‘48’ – music of ‘unsurpassed inventiveness’.

The seeds for Messiaen’s final organ work were sown during an inspirational trip to Israel in 1984. Over the course of the following twelve months, the aging composer found improvisation leading him back to composition as he recovered from the exhausting labours that had produced his opera Saint François d’Assise. The Livre du Saint Sacrement became Messiaen’s grand farewell to his own instrument, and Michael Bonaventure performs it on the Rieger organ of St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, whose true acoustic preserves the clarity of Messiaen’s lines.

‘Bach’s music tests the pianist in many ways, but one of the most telling is that it asks how much or how little the performer should exert ego. Hill gets the balance just about right in an intimate account … that nevertheless oozes authority’ — Sunday Times, June 2013 J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book Two Peter Hill piano DCD34101 (2 discs)

‘warmth, clarity and insight’ — Classical Music Magazine, March 2013, EDITOR’S CHOICE ‘exceptional readings, scholarly yet living … For all the compositional rigour, Hill makes these Preludes and Fugues sing and dance, and also brings out their unshakeable foundations of faith’ — HiFi Critic, March 2012 ‘Note his use of varied pianistic colours – here muted, there radiant, sonorous then shimmering. And [he] unfolds contrapuntal lines with clarity, displaying an eloquent understanding of the music’s underlying structure’ — BBC Music Magazine, May 2012, FIVE STARS

Part of Delphian’s series – 7 discs in total, split across four volumes – of the complete Messiaen organ music. ‘utterly compelling’ — BBC Music Magazine, Proms edition 2008, INSTRUMENTAL CHOICE Dallapiccola: a portrait David Wilde piano, Susan Hamilton soprano, Nicola Stonehouse mezzo-soprano, Robert Irvine cello, members of the Fell Clarinet Quartet DCD34020

Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–1975) is one of the most celebrated Italian composers of the twentieth century. This disc features chamber music and songs alongside his complete works for solo piano. Whether drawing on the music of the past to nourish the contrapuntal organisation of his own, or concentrating on the opportunities for gentle lyricism afforded by bell-like vocal and instrumental sonorities, Dallapiccola’s commitment to traditional expressive nuance has been seen by critics as a powerful aspect of his Italian insistence upon cantabilità – songfulness. ‘a marriage of discipline and imagination of which Wilde is fully aware …

[Stonehouse] is eloquence itself in the Goethe-Lieder’ — Gramophone, April 2007

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