Rapture requires 176 keys

Easter eve. Spring’s second day, and Purim’s. The moon, coming off full, hangs over Santa Monica Bay. The weather is balmy. Night-blooming jasmine perfumes soft air. Lovers walk hand in hand.

But all is not well in paradise. The homeless add their misery to the Palisades. Raymond Chandler would have had a wisecrack and a crime for such a scene.

Instead, there is, a block from the shore, music -- Jacaranda in flower with Messiaen. Santa Monica’s new-music series, Jacaranda, at First Presbyterian Church, is besotted with the French composer. It began celebrating the coming 100th anniversary of his birth (Dec. 10) last year and will continue doing so for a while. Saturday night, “Visions de l’Amen” was the main work.

In this score for two pianos, Messiaen said amen to Creation; to the stars; to the agony of Jesus; to desire; to birds, saints and angels; to the Day of Judgment; and, yes, to paradise. Most of all, though, he exulted in ardent, unquenchable Desire -- the passions for life, love, nature and the divine, eroticism and spirituality all entwined.

“Visions de l’Amen” is a feast of glorious, pealing music for blighted times. Messiaen composed it in 1943, in Nazi-occupied Paris, for himself and a young pianist, Yvonne Loriod, who became his muse. He wrote with the fervent belief that the artist’s role is to reveal ecstasy as the way of the world, no matter how bleak the temporal situation.

At the moment, these seven rapturous amens have our attention. On Saturday, Double Edge was the third duo to perform the score in our region during the last month.

Formed 30 years ago by Nurit Tilles and Edmund Niemann, Double Edge has long been on the cutting edge of the new-music scene. John Cage, Meredith Monk and Steve Reich have been among the many major composers who have sought out these excellent pianists. “Visions de l’Amen” is one of their specialties.

A joy of Jacaranda is in programming full of context. Double Edge began with “Frescoes,” two long movements for two pianos by William Bolcom, written in 1971. A decade earlier, the American composer had studied with Messiaen, but he quickly moved on, with Scott Joplin, Broadway classics, rock and various aspects of classical music and jazz also capturing his insatiable fancy.

This too is music from a time of war. A Vietnam protest piece, “Frescos” has deep, dark, Messiaen-like bass rumblings that set the scene of each movement. The pianists occasionally go after each other, their grands in battle, taking pauses to lick their wounds in quiet music on harmonium and harpsichord, which sit beside the Steinways. Other music of all kinds enters the stream-of-consciousness fray. What Bolcom took away most from Messiaen was the idea that exuberance is the activist artist’s secret weapon.

Also on the program’s first half were the mystical solo horn movement from Messiaen’s chamber orchestra epic, “From the Canyons to the Stars,” and his fleshy Theme and Variations for violin and piano -- a sumptuous love letter written when he was 24 to his first wife. Richard Todd (horn), Sarah Thornblade (violin) and Vicki Ray (piano) were the engaging performers.

Double Edge’s “Visions de l’Amen” had the duo’s typically exciting hard edge. These are modernist players through and through. They attack the 45-minute score as ear-grabbing new music, as a swirling mass of spellbinding sonorities and as a funhouse of rhythmic invention. They do not deny the music its mysticism or eroticism, but they make no interpretive value judgments.

These pianists’ exuberance is in their virtuosity. Double Edge raises the temperature in the room but steers clear of imposing escapist fantasies on the audience, leaving listeners their spiritual privacy. It was a tremendous performance.

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mark.swed@latimes.com