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We continue our Messiaen centenary series with a performance in an unconventional medium:

What could be more gratifying than finding superb musicianship in unexpected places?

The New York Festival of Song has made a triumphal procession around the bounds, dredged the rivers, and scaled the promontories of song for twenty treasurable years. In observance of their significant anniversary, they have — true to the gaily transgressive spirit of many of their programs — effected two important commissions, not of song but of opera. For one week only, they become the New York Festival of Opera.

The chosen composers are so well-chosen as to seem almost inevitable. William Bolcom, the world’s most youthful grand old man of his craft, turns seventy this year. John Musto, who shares a distinct musical affinity with him, is a generation younger. They both are musicians of astounding natural gifts, are brilliant pianists, speak a wide variety of musical languages with fluency, and are married to extraordinary singers.

The two operas by these two masters of orchestration in fact employ two pianos in place of an orchestra, piano being the normal accompaniment at NYFOS concerts. The pianos were manned by two other formidable musicians, the founders of the NYFOS, Michael Barrett and Steven Blier.

Each opera is of one act, and together they make a full, satisfying entertainment. The word entertainment is used with deliberation here, since both these composers rejoice in and cultivate that rare ability: to be consistently diverting while doing so via only the most cultivated means. This also is appropriate to the NYFOS affect, which has strong roots in the artistic ethic of another artist whose birth anniversary we celebrate this year, Leonard Bernstein. 
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 One of the glories of our age is the new viability of Handel’s operas as mass entertainment. After many years of accepting the judgment of the audiences of his own time that his invention, the English oratorio, was where his main greatness lay, we have come to see what Winton Dean long since recognized as the musical and dramatic genius of Handel’s operas. A prime innovation of his oratorios was the role of the chorus, which became an actor in the drama rather than a mere commentator. Benjamin Britten, when he created his great opera Peter Grimes, took that aspect of his English heritage and inserted it back into opera.

In the current new production of that work at the Metropolitan Opera, we have rounded off the circle in one sense: though performed with costumes and a stark, semi-representational set, Peter Grimes seems to reveal itself as an oratorio rather than an opera.

To observe this is to slam neither the Met nor Britten. Concert performances of some operas are even more successful than staged versions. I leave it to others to decide whether Peter Grimes is one of those operas. 

 Is it important to see what Bach’s face looked like in life? We have, in Princeton, the one portrait that he is known to have sat for. Is it somehow comforting to have a scientific reconstruction as well? And is it reliable? Perhaps they should use the same process to reconstruct the face of, say, Eliott Carter or Alfred Brendel so that we can see how accurate the likeness is.

After Sunday’s Messiaen experience at Carnegie Hall, it was invigorating to know that there was another toothsome evening of his music coming up tonight at St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue, including another belated New York premiere. Unfortunately, in a sort of situation that a New Yorker may be inclined both to mourn and to brag about, there was to be something equally rare going on at the same time in the Juilliard School’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater: a complete performance of a work that Messiaen composed for New York, Des canyons aux étoiles… 

The students of the School’s newest new-music group, Axiom Ensemble, seemed to have a sense that this was in fact a rare occasion. And that was only one of the senses in which they “knew what they were doing,” for the technical skill on display in these young people was astonishing. No doubt the crucial requisite for the success of the evening was their remarkable mentor in such repertory. Jeffrey Milarsky is fast becoming, if he hasn’t already become, the doyen of 20th- and 21st-century music’s performance in New York. He’s certainly one of our busiest musicians. He pops up everywhere, bearing musical scores of the most daunting complexity, which he brings off with all appearance of ease and a musicality that seems to have no bounds at all. 

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Soon after he was released from a Nazi prison camp, where he had famously composed and performed the Quatour pour la fin du temps, Olivier Messiaen was appointed to teach harmony at the Paris Conservatory. The young teacher took a novel approach to his first class. Walking in without addressing or even acknowledging the assembled group, he sat down at the piano, opened the orchestral score of Debussy’s Prélude à laprès-midi d’un faune, played the work through flawlessly, closed the score and took it with him from the room. The class was irretrievably in love with him.

Nowadays the students might probably report such an event to the front office, and the teacher would be at least officially warned. In a film, La Liturgie de cristal, a much later Conservatory class taught by Messiaen is shown. He is again sitting at the piano, students are gathered in seats behind him, and he is again playing — this time from a work that he claimed dominated his life, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. He is not just playing the orchestral part but singing the vocal lines. (“I sing like a composer,” he unnecessarily apologizes for what is in fact accurate and expressive singing.) He is pointing up and asking students about aspects of the text setting (the repeated word loin receiving illuminating attention as expressing how far from normal reality Mélisande — and, by implication, her music — is).

Though he is one of the most respected composers of his century, most of us think of Messiaen simply as the creator of his own highly characteristic works. Or, if we know a little more, we remember him as a master organist-pianist and teacher of other major composers. But the centenary of Messiaen’s birth, involving celebrations in many countries, may fill out the picture for many.
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Vastness of output is not always a reliable gage of a classical composer’s success. Max Reger reached an opus 106 before he died at 43, and many of his opus numbers contain many compositions within them — sometimes 60 or so. On the other end of the statistical chart, however, is someone like Maurice Duruflé, whose catalogue gets to only opus 14 in his 84 years. But because of the extreme popularity of some of his works (the Requiem, his Suite, etc.), Duruflé’s slender list probably gets more performances than the far richer catalogue of Reger.

It’s a cheering fact that we have composers in this century who are both prolific and constantly performed. Tonight (on his 47th birthday) Lowell Liebermann‘s new String Quartet No. 4 was performed at the Mannes College concert hall by the Orion String Quartet. That it is already opus 103 in a catalogue that features operas, symphonies, and concertos is an earnest of Mr. Liebermann’s industry. That he is performed with great regularity around the world is a sign of something even happier. (And it is an illustration of the restraint of the current large list of performances on his Web site that even tonight’s important concert is absent.)
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Vladimir Nabokov would not have been the ideal reader of this site: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds … The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones.” But there are a lot of other varieties of musical experience, and you’ve probably been hearing a lot about Oliver Sacks’s latest book on the subject. If you haven’t read it, this review will probably make you want to.