Wash out your ears
Adam Shatz: Messiaen’s Ecstasies, 20 February 2025
Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography
by Robert Sholl.
Reaktion, 255 pp., £25, May 2024,978 1 78914 865 7 Show More
by Robert Sholl.
Reaktion, 255 pp., £25, May 2024,
Messiaen in Context
edited by Robert Sholl.
Cambridge, 348 pp., £95, November 2023,978 1 108 48791 7 Show More
edited by Robert Sholl.
Cambridge, 348 pp., £95, November 2023,
“... inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil ... ”