MUSIC REVIEW : Pilkington Launches Messiaen Fest in Pasadena

The vivid, sprawling sonic orgies of Olivier Messiaen are not concert commonplaces. Nowhere, perhaps, is their absence more keenly felt than in the stagnant standard organ repertory.

One reason for the relative dearth of Messiaen is the very monumentality of his work, as an enterprising and ambitious Fete Messiaen at Pasadena Presbyterian Church suggests--three concerts, three pieces.

Steve Pilkington, music director and organist at the church, launched the seasonally oriented mini-festival Sunday afternoon with “La Nativite du Seigneur.” A characteristic fusion of mysticism and voluptuousness from 1935, the piece consists of nine meditations on specific images ranging from the earthy physicality of “Les Bergers” to theological abstractions such as “Desseins Eternels.”

At once highly rhapsodic and rigorously symbolic, the music bursts with invention and fervor. Its raptures are tightly focused throughout the thematically integrated meditations, yet maintain an illusion of improvisatory spontaneity, in the solemn and sorrowing detours as much as in the predominate joy.

Pilkington treated it with colorful care--a shade too much deliberation in the fierce gladness of “Les Enfants de Dieu” and the fluttering ecstasies of “Les Anges,” but rising vigorously to the exultation of the “Dieu Parmi Nous” finale. He manipulated the potent resources of the resident Aeolian-Skinner instrument deftly for both clarity and texture, and made the 65-minute immersion seem short.

He also did not trust the extraordinarily evocative music to create its own imagery, showing a motley collection of Italian and Flemish Rennaisance art in projections. Though, as Pilkington said in a brief introduction, the fervor expressed in the art and music was a match, he could have chosen more stylistically compatible pictures, and the notion that Messiaen needed to be made more “accessible” implies some very sad suspicions about his audience.

Fete Messiaen ends tonight with the Southern California premiere of the “Livre du Saint Sacrement,” played by organist Edward Murray.