Messiaen / Hafner - L'ascension & La Nativite Du Seigneur (CD)

All Music Guide

Olivier Messiaen's virtuosic and mystical organ music is central to his oeuvre, and within this body of work, L'Ascension (1934) and La Nativité du Seigneur (1935) mark an important turning point in his development. Perhaps L'Ascension represents Messiaen's fullest exploitation of his early, Impressionistic harmonic style albeit modified with increasingly more complex dissonances and tonal explorations that go further afield but La Nativité signals the beginning stages of his mature work, since it features the then novel but soon to be familiar techniques of additive rhythms, polyrhythms, ostinati, odd meters, Eastern scales, static modes, bird calls, and other features common in his later, fully realized masterpieces. Indeed, Messiaen used the publication of La Nativité to introduce his theories, and referred several times to this seminal piece in Technique de mon langage musical. These 2004 recordings by organist and Messiaen authority Wilhelm Hafner are vibrantly hued and shaded, ...thanks to the wonderful array of stops available on the Sandtner Organ in the Basilika St. Ulrich und Afra in Augsburg. The lively resonance of the church gives a rich luster to the organ's sonorities, with a pleasantly delayed response when loud chords cut off, and an aural halo in soft passages that lends a subtle sense of depth. - Blair Sanderson, All Music Guide Read more Less