For the second evening of their Barbican residency, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic turned to Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux Étoiles for a performance that was as much an installation as a concert. Messiaen’s profoundly Catholic meditation on the glory of creation as revealed in the landscape of Utah was transformed into a big multimedia event by photographer Deborah O’Grady and lighting designers Seth Reiser and Stephen Terry. Shifting coloured lights reflected the composer’s synaesthesia. Images of Bryce Canyon and Zion national park, their landscapes slowly changing before our eyes, were displayed on a vast screen behind the players.
There were, however, tensions within it. Messiaen saw the canyons as an earthly paradise that formed an intimation of its celestial counterpart. For O’Grady, they are more a despoiled Eden, their grandeur endangered by the humanity that creeps ant-like across their surfaces. She is at her best when she replicates Messiaen’s sense of awe: macrocosm becomes microcosm as the Milky Way is transformed into drifting sands; her footage of the canyons themselves takes your breath away. Elsewhere, however, her shots of pylons, oil derricks and tramping tourists grate at times against the music’s numinosity.
The visuals aroused mixed feelings. Were they necessary at all? Those sitting in the back stalls had to put up with the aggravation of someone noisily cueing the projections during the first half of the performance.
But musically, it was extremely impressive. Dudamel proves a fine Messiaen interpreter, keenly alert to nuances of colour and rhythm, finding detail and drama within the slowly moving grandeur. The playing was often pristine in its beauty, with tour de force instrumental solos from pianist Joanne Pearce Martin and principal horn Andrew Bain, and tremendous woodwind in the climactic Bryce Canyon et les Rochers Rouges-Orange.
