Heavenly chorus awash with colour - Messiaen 100: Naji Hakim

Published on Friday 1 August 2008 17:32

AMID the sound and fury of tram roadworks, Usher Hall renovations, shouting leafleteers and bongo players clamouring through Edinburgh this month, a small corner of the International Festival's programme has been set aside to celebrate the centenary of an idiosyncratic composer who would have happily tuned out the mêlée in order to hear a blackbird singing in Princes Street Gardens.

Born in 1908, Olivier Messiaen, the lifelong organist at Paris's La Sainte Trinit, is an increasingly familiar name in modern concert programmes. An idiot's guide to the influential composer might include: the inspiration of his Catholicism; his obsession with birdsong; an interest in the music of India, Bali and Ancient Greece; a nod to surrealism; and the sense of sound as washes of colour. The colours were quite literal – Messiaen had synaesthesia, where normally separate senses, such as hearing and vision, are experienced "in union" – blocking out whole sections of his scores in blues or purples.

It was perhaps in his use of rhythm that he was most innovative, creating pieces from jumps, shifts and repeating "cells" of notes that could be constantly interwoven. He called it Modes of Limited Transposition, and it influenced composers worldwide, including his students, Boulez and Stockhausen.

Messiaen taught himself the piano and started composing as a boy, enraptured by the sonic landscapes in his head. Moving to Paris to study music in 1919, he took up his post at La Trinit in 1931. The only break in his commitment to the post was an army stint during the Second World War. Captured in 1940, he wrote his best-known chamber work, Quatuor pour la fin du temps, for his fellow inmates in Stalag VIII-A.

"Listening to a Messiaen piece is more like visiting pictures at an exhibition, so you have the sensation of going from one picture to the next and the next – but then maybe, instead of continuing on, you go back and have another look at the second one," says Naji Hakim (below), the organist and composer who took over at La Sainte Trinit in 1992 after Messiaen's death, and who will give two recitals in St Giles' Cathedral next week.

The composer played an influential role in Hakim's life, first felt during his teenage years in Lebanon. "We had a rare visit from a French organist and I desperately wanted to find out what new works had been written since the Romantic period. She said to me, 'I will send you a score by Messiaen.'

"I couldn't even sight read it at the time, let alone play it, but it was the beginning of my great respect for him."

A decade later in Paris, Hakim met Messiaen frequently, and the composer asked him to become his successor at La Trinit. He died two months later, leading Hakim to compose his own tribute, Le Tombeau d'Olivier Messiaen. He will play it in St Giles' next week, alongside one of the composer's earliest works, Offrande au Saint Sacrament, discovered by his widow after his death. "It already has the harmonic characteristics of his style, a very fine and meditative piece," says Hakim, who will also play the stunning Dieu Parmi Nous. "His great legacy is in this very personal musical language. He was very much an innovator, both rhythmically and on the organ."

Messiaen's final work, Eclairs sur l'au del (Illuminations Of The Hereafter), will be heard in the other EIF centenary event, the BBC SSOs concert on August 10, a piece that demonstrates his lifelong obsession, which, it is said, led him to play abroad only if he hadn't collected that country's birdsong. "His wife invited me to their home after his death," says Hakim, "and I saw that he had a special suitcase for every trip, all packed with birdsong from different parts of the world."

• Messiaen 100: Naji Hakim, St Giles' Cathedral, Saturday, 10.30pm and August 11. Eclairs sur l'au del, conducted by Ilan Volkov, Usher Hall, August 10, 8pm

• www.eif.co.uk