There are very few instances on recordings of “bad” Messiaen. His musical style is too particular and his principal interpreters were too close to him (and his large circle) to admit a huge range of interpretive options. Performers either know what they’re doing and get it right, or they don’t bother at all. That said, Messiaen’s last completed work, Illuminations of the Beyond, has had less time to establish itself in the repertoire and enjoys no history of composer-supervised performance (though the composer’s wife Yvonne Loriod was of course involved in the work’s New York premiere and subsequent initial renditions abroad). Still, the possibility of a markedly different interpretation might be thought more probable in this of all his major works, and so it proves here.
This is the fourth recording of Éclairs, and it differs from the previous three (from DG, ABC Classics and Jade–this last no longer available) principally in the more majestic tempos that Sylvain Cambreling adopts for the big slow movements. His timing for the whole work adds 10 minutes to that of Chung’s DG recording, half of it in the fifth movement, “Demeurer dans l’amour…”, and most of the balance in the final “Le Christ, lumière du Paradis”. David Porcelijn in his fine Australian recording shares Cambreling’s slower take on the last movement but sides with Chung in the fifth. In the other movements, Cambreling shows greater affinity to the two earlier recordings and there’s not so much to choose between them, at least in terms of speed.
The SWR players sustain these slow tempos very convincingly, and the result will either sound transcendental or interminable, depending on your perspective; but on the whole they work well thanks to some very confident and concentrated work from the string section. These are also, harmonically speaking, the most consonant parts of the whole piece, and so they might be said to give it a more inviting (or at least traditional) harmonic aspect overall. The orchestra’s superb winds also execute their many birdsong imitations with great verve, and of all of the available performances this certainly is the most highly contrasted, the most distinctively characterized from movement to movement. Typically excellent sonics from the SWR radio engineers make this disc essential listening for anyone intrigued by the possibilities offered by Messiaen’s last major work, and if forced to choose just one version, this would be it.
