Messiaen and aesthetics

I've come to the end of listening to a series of LPs containing the music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), sometimes considered to be the mystic of 20th-Century music (although Tavener and Górecki partisans might disagree). The works I listened to come from all parts of his life as a composer:

• Le banquet céleste (1928)
• Les Bergers (1936)
• Petites liturgies de la présence divine (1943)
• Quatour pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) (1941)
• Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus (1944)
• Harawi (Chant d’amour et de mort) (1945)
• Reveil des Oiseaux for Piano and Orchestra (1953)
• Oiseaux exotiques (1955-1956)
• La bouscarle (1956-1958)
• Couleurs de la cié céleste (1963)
• Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (1964)

Of all these, the best-known are justified for their interest and accessibility: Quatour pour la fin du temps and Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus. I transferred two wildly differing—but both beautiful in unique ways—performances of the quartet, and sadly listened through and discarded a wrecked LP of Michel Béroff wonderfully performing the Vingt regards.

The audience who knows Messiaen through his Turangalîla-Symphony (1948) are familiar with his masses of sound, almost thick sometimes as fog (or detractors might say "smoke"). The later work by Messiaen, such as Coleurs that I listened to, make use of a smaller ensemble that still produces a huge variety of timbre, including silence. I found the silence was often a major building block of his edifice, and in its way a contributor to a sensation of wonder, and sometimes confusion.

Luckily, we have many other Messiaen works already in CD format. I look forward to the opportunity to play them again with more time devoted to the listening.