Messiaen

This is no longer the uptight atmosphere where John Adams was angrily booed and where people noisily walked out as Zubin Mehta premiered major new works by Olivier Messiaen and Iannis Xenakis.

In the late ’50s, Jones relocated to Paris, where he studied composition with the highly regarded teacher Nadia Boulanger and composer Olivier Messiaen.

Bullock took a spectacular deep dive into a seldom-heard song cycle by Olivier Messiaen, an hour of agony and ecstasy full of obscurities about the European Tristan myth, using a French text peppered with Quechua, an indigenous South American language.

A lot has been made of the circumstances of Messiaen’s hourlong cycle, for which he wrote his own song texts.

Messiaen here began his development of a spectacular new musical language for a picture of ecstatic love that transcends death.