Messiaen: Les corps glorieux

Album review

Messiaen's 1939 Les corps glorieux: Sept visions brèves de la vie des Ressuscités (The Glorified Bodies: Seven Brief Visions of the Life of the Resurrected) is one of the composer's most appealing and accessible organ works. Each of its movements distinctively characterizes an aspect of Messiaen's understanding of the resurrected body, not in this case Jesus' body, but the bodies of believers, with titles derived from the New Testament, like "The Refinement of the Glorified Bodies," "The Strength and Agility of the Glorified Bodies," and "The Joy and Brightness of the Glorified Bodies." Its seven movements are symmetrically fanned around the long central fourth movement, "The Battle Between Life and Death." Only its first four minutes depict conflict; the remaining 12 minutes are a serenely radiant meditation on the triumph of life. Messiaen makes extensive use of solo lines throughout the piece; the entire first movement is a single rhapsodic melodic line, and he only introduces chords into the fifth movement in its closing moments. Messiaen's melodies are infinitely absorbing in their tonal and rhythmic variety. He manages to make them seem both freely improvised and sharply focused in their logic and expressive intent. Colin Andrews is fully persuasive in conveying those apparently contradictory elements. In particular, he shapes the solo lines with subtlety and finesse, so that they are continually intriguing. The slow sections are especially graceful and luminous. The sound is good, with the right amount of resonance, and captures the range of the colorful registrations with depth and clarity.
© TiVo