'A place of solemn, sacred sonic ritual' ... a packed Royal Albert Hall with full symphony orchestra at this year's Proms. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Messiaen at his most uncompromising at the Proms last night, which I was presenting for Radio 3. Couple of things of special significance: firstly, that around 5,500 people cheered one of his most austere masterpieces, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, to the rafters, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung, turned the Albert Hall's secular Victoriana into a place of solemm, sacred sonic ritual. Have a watch here. Messiaen himself said that Et exspecto, which he wrote in the Alps in 1964, with its scoring for winds, brass, bells, gongs, and tam-tams, could be played outside, even on mountaintops - finally, a piece that fitted and filled the cavernousness of the Albert Hall.
It worked, too, and not just in the music's terrifying blazes of tam-tam and gong crescendos but, more importantly, in the gigantic silences after them. Such complete concentration from the players, and the audience, meant that you felt the silence as a physical entity, just as much as the loudest fortissimo.
It got me thinking: who are the other composers who mastered the art of silence? This is different from Cage's idea of silence, in which you're supposed to attune yourself to the sounds that fill our sonic environment even when we think we're being quiet. Messiaen's use of silence in Et exspecto is more like the silences in Bruckner symphonies, or the gaps between the final chords of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony or Sibelius's Fifth Symphony - maybe the most pregnant pauses in all of classical music; "rests" that are filled with more activity and momentum than other composers' whole opus.
More Messiaen coming up throughout the Proms - I'm especially looking forward to another couple I'll be on the microphone for: this Sunday's La transfiguration (when was the last time this huge work, the pinnacle of Messiaen's music of the 1960s - fourteen movements for huge choir and orchestra - was done in this country?), and his magnum opus, the opera Saint François d'Assise, in September. And to hearing more of the sounding silences of Messiaen's musical universe.
