We use cookies to make our website work, to improve your experience, to analyse our traffic and to tailor our communications and marketing. You can choose which of these to accept, or accept all.
Help
They produce an orchestral range of colour, and there seems to be an eternity of space and time for Messaien's music to vibrate, with its whiffs of incense and flutterings of birdsong. Yet this... — Andrew McGregor, bbc.co.uk, 20th November 2004
More…
Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days
Contents
Steven Osborne (piano), Martin Roscoe (piano) Show 4 remaining tracks for Messiaen: Visions de l'Amen for 2 pianos Hide 4 tracks for Messiaen: Visions de l'Amen for 2 pianos
20th November 2004
They produce an orchestral range of colour, and there seems to be an eternity of space and time for Messaien's music to vibrate, with its whiffs of incense and flutterings of birdsong. Yet this is one of the faster recordings, and the enormous dynamic range (from the most delicate pppp to a Steinway-threatening triple forte) is accommodated superbly by a demonstration-class recording.
2010
It's axiomatic (to use a favourite word of the French) that the Messiaens' own 1962 disc of Visions is irreplaceable. At the same time it raises the common interpretative problem when composers play their own music: should we follow what they say in musical and verbal notes, or what they do? Such problems don't arise with the three early pieces, which hardly show Messiaen at his best, but the metronome mark for the very slow first movement of Visions, which literally sets the groundwork for the cycle, dictates a duration of 6'15". He and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, dispatch it in 4'30". Steven Osborne and Martin Roscoe (like the old Regis recording by Peter Hill and Benjamin Frith) prefer to believe the score, and the result is an impressively relentless sweep from the faintest pppp to a searing fff.
Only a pile-up of adjectives, to which should be added coruscating and addictively dithyrambic, could do justice
