Messiaen - La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ

 

 

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I thought this version on the Haenssler label of Messiaen's 'La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ', conducted by Sylvain Cambreling, was the best out of three recordings I have both heard and bought.

The orchestra on Deutscher Grammophon's version by Myung-Whun Chung seems to drown the choir in many places, though I do prefer the way DG have splendidly captured the sound and resonance of the gongs. The cymbals are a bit tinny on the Haenssler discs, though I got used to them after a couple of listens. The live recording on the Montaigne label sounds too far back in the audience to me and because of this, it unfortunately makes this magisterial piece lose much of its highs and lows, though favoured more than the Myung-Whun Chung recording by Gramophone. This is after all a great choral work by Messiaen, with huge orchestral forces and many moments of solemn reflection and points where he reaches for the heavens and aims to grasp the deepest mysteries of the transfiguration episode in Jesus' life. It's a wonderful, grand and dazzingly work.

For me the Haenssler recording, conducted by Cambreling, possess a satisfactory balance between both the choir and orchestra and is beautifully performed by the SWR Symphony and sung by the EuropaChorAkademie (directed by Joshard Daus) - though a 70s Decca recording conducted by Antal Doráti, according one Amazon reviewer who has written on the version by Myung-Whun Chung, is also worth getting. Yet because of recording capabilities of the time, it is possibly not going to sound as crisp, and the choir on it is described as "lost at sea" by a reviewer who gives the Karl Anton Rickenbacher recording five stars, which I have yet to hear. However, the Rickenbacher cuts the second part in two in order to make room for extra tracks on the second disc, whereas if the extra pieces were put on the beginning of Disc One there would have been no need for the split.

What I particularly like about the Haenssler recording is that the choir and occasional instrumental parts, invariably playing bird-song (a typical mid to late Messiaen trademark), are clearly audible and separated out from the main orchestral support, instead of blending into and becoming indistinguishable from one another, and how Cambreling instinctively knows how to bring the music down to explore some of the piece's subtleties - I invariably hear something new in Cambreling's interpretation whenever I listen to it - as well as take it to its heights and explosive ear-shattering moments. Yet this is not one of those recordings where you can never quite seem to get the balance right on your CD player. I am sure Amazon readers will know what I mean: the 'one minute you cannot hear it and the next it is too loud' problem that some recordings have. Peguin rate the DG recording more than the Haenssler, and write about DG's sound quality being more spacious, where in fact I would say that it is the complete opposite - there is far more of a spaciousness about the Haenssler recording.

The combination of a full choir - singing various religious texts and scripture in Latin and primarily in a chant-like fashion - and orchestra with massive amounts of percussion makes for fantastic and meditative listening. Apart from the St. Francis opera, this is Messiaen's most extensive choral work, which because of the huge forces involved must be a challenge for any conscientious recording company to balance onto disc. But I think five stars for Haenssler doing a pretty decent job, though I did not quite understand why they used a non-religious painting by Turner on the cover of a 20th century French composer's work about the Transfiguration, and the additional 1953 live and historical track of 'Reveil Oiseax' is a bit of a disappointment, as the quality of the recording does not match the rest of this transcendental and sometimes delightfully quirky double CD. However, the CD's booklet could not be more thorough.

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