Thanks for Yin Zheng, Assistant Professor of Piano at Oakland for setting up this concert for me. Yin is an old college friend of mine from the Eastman days and it was great to catch up and it meet some of her students at Oakland.
It's funny to me because a piece like the Vingt Regards just feels like it belongs to certain places and not to others. With any place that has lots of cars and distress, Messiaen's Vingt Regards seems to comment on that environment in interesting ways and seems to fight against this mundane grime to show beautiful alternatives through creativity. The more time I dig into this music, the more I come to see this music as commentary on ideas of religious ecstasy and of spiritual matters. Grappling with one's faith in twenty different ways in order to find a solution perhaps..
Isn't this what music is supposed to do anyway? Taking us out of our current state of thinking to transport us to another place.
In the pre-concert talk I was telling the students of the Napalm bomb aspect of the "Theme of God" that comes in Mov. 6 in order to break with all of the previous contrapuntal music and systematic ordering that comes earlier. Perhaps the entire piece is like this in other ways, like pouring cold water over someone who has been sleeping for two days in order to wake them.
