Olivier Messiaen: Catalogue d'oiseaux & Petites esquisses d'oiseaux

Featuring

Alfonso Gómez
Olivier Messiaen

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Composer Biography

Olivier Messiaen was a synesthete, meaning he associated sounds with colors, and his music was influenced by composers like Debussy, Stravinsky, and Mussorgsky.

Performer Biography

Alfonso Gómez, the Spanish-German pianist on this recording, is known as a significant interpreter of 20th and 21st-century piano repertoire and has won 11 national and international prizes.

Composition History

The monumental, almost three-hour-long Catalogue d'oiseaux, which features 77 birds, was first performed in its entirety by Messiaen's future wife and dedicatee, Yvonne Loriod, in Paris on April 15, 1959.

Composer Biography

Messiaen described three "dramas" of his life: speaking of birdsong to city dwellers, seeing colors when listening to music (synaesthesia), and developing a free rhythmic system inspired by nature.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Olivier Messiaen, the composer, stated that birds were his "first and most important teachers" and he approached their art with scientific meticulousness.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Messiaen considered nature and birdsong his passions and refuge, and symbolically, birds represented freedom to him.

Compositional Technique

Messiaen's compositional strategies for birdsong involve transcribing extremely fast tempi into slower ones and writing high registers one to three octaves lower, replacing very small intervals with semitones.