Cézanne always painted the same mountain landscape, with varying shades and colors. Monet kept painting Rouen Cathedral, usually from much the same point of view. We find something similar in Messiaen. And not so much that obsession with one point of view. But the struggle to find the balance between dry observation and imagination. His extensive piano book Catalog d'Oiseaux is a quasi objective
… account of the French bird population. The habitat of the birds is also painted. That is to say: the landscape, neighboring birds, wind, water, colors. But it is also fanciful and dramatic, if only because Messiaen had to translate all those impressions into the possibilities of the piano. In the piece about the tawny owl, Messiaen asks the player to sound like 'the cry of a murdered child'. How that is possible, I don't know, but Aimard's game is in any case horrifying. ', According to the review in de Volkskrant. (HJ)more
