A Mystic in the Making (2007)

Gail Archer, director of the music program at Barnard College, Columbia University, plays two of Messiaen's earliest large-scale organ works on this CD. The CD's title implies that the composer's mysticism was an element of his music that developed over time, but it sounds like the mystical impulse is fully in place in his four-movement suite L'Ascension (1932-1933), and that only his means of expressing it became increasingly compositionally sophisticated and individual over time. The original version of L'Ascension was ... Read More

Gail Archer, director of the music program at Barnard College, Columbia University, plays two of Messiaen's earliest large-scale organ works on this CD. The CD's title implies that the composer's mysticism was an element of his music that developed over time, but it sounds like the mystical impulse is fully in place in his four-movement suite L'Ascension (1932-1933), and that only his means of expressing it became increasingly compositionally sophisticated and individual over time. The original version of L'Ascension was written for orchestra, but Messiaen premiered a transcription for organ in 1935, and that version has surpassed the popularity of the original. In a major departure from the orchestral version, Messiaen wrote an entirely new third movement, because he felt the original wasn't workable on a keyboard. L'Ascension is one of the composer's most accessible and engaging organ pieces, and one of the most important of his early works. The harmonic language is clearly Messiaen's own, even... Read Less