The final installment of Paul Kim’s Messiaen cycle matches its predecessors for rock-solid technical aplomb and scrupulous musicianship. To be sure, Kim is not a colorist or a tone-poet, and he doesn’t seem to possess a large dynamic range, but that may be the dry and monochrome recorded ambience talking. While his readings of Messiaen’s early Preludes don’t offer the wondrous digital refinement and shimmering nuance of Alexander Lonquich’s remarkable ECM traversals, Kim impresses with his ability to shape and sustain slower, more inward pieces so that their static qualities are minimized. I’m thinking of Kim’s keen dynamic scaling and textural differentiation in the Sixth Prelude (it heavily borrows from the somber tolling bells of Ravel’s Gibet). In the fifth prelude (Les sons impalpables du rêve…) Kim’s voicing of the constantly moving chord clouds conveys a strong sense of their inner lines. The protracted Les offrandes oubliées also benefits from Kim’s rapt concentration, careful voice leading, and overall delicacy.
Fantasie burlesque might be considered Messiaen’s mash-up of Stravinsky’s Piano Rag Music and Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cake Walk, but singularly reharmonized. Here Kim brings more instinctive flair and rhythmic verve to the outer sections’ syncopations than anyone else on disc, and digs into the cheesy final tremolos for all they’re worth. The studio piano’s lack of resonating power and poor tuning stick out like sore thumbs in the Pièce pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas, yet oddly enough these defects fortify the music’s bleak intensity. In all, Paul Kim’s Messiaen cycle adds up to a major achievement for this most sincere and scholarly interpreter.
