Liszt and Messiaen: Bird Pieces – Fredrik Ullén

Birds again. Always the birds — Liszt heard them as emblems of a saint’s tenderness, Messiaen heard them as the literal voice of God, and somewhere between those two convictions Fredrik Ullén has built a recital that shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does.

The premise sounds like the kind of thing a musicologist dreams up at 2 a.m. and regrets by breakfast. Liszt the worldly virtuoso, the Abbé who took minor orders at Santa Maria in Trastevere and wore the cassock more as costume than conviction (or so his enemies said); Messiaen the twentieth-century mystic who transcribed actual birdsong in Yvelines meadows with a notebook and a metronome and something close to religious terror. Ullén doesn’t pretend they’re the same composer separated by a century. He’s after something subtler — a family resemblance, the kind you notice in the tilt of a jaw across three generations of a photograph.

It mostly convinces. The disc opens with “Sancta Dorothea,” that odd, chaste little miniature Liszt tossed off in 1877, all bare fourths and devotional plainness — Ullén plays it without a trace of sentimentality, which is exactly right, since sentimentality is the one thing that kills late Liszt stone dead. Then straight into the first of the Two Légendes, “St. François d’Assise: La Prédication aux oiseaux,” and here I have reservations. Ullén’s articulation is extraordinary — every grace note lands like a struck match — but the accentuation can turn unforgiving, even brittle, where a rounder tone, a touch more pedal-haze, might let the birds actually flutter rather than peck. Compare Ciccolini, whose 1970s EMI account of the Légendes breathes more Franciscan air, less percussive glare.

Where the disc earns its keep is in the interleaving. Messiaen’s Petites Esquisses d’oiseaux — miniature, densely notated, harmonically feral — get folded in among the Consolations sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, and the effect is genuinely illuminating rather than merely clever. The First Consolation drifting into the second Esquisse: you hear, suddenly, how much unresolved yearning both composers were willing to leave hanging in the air, unclosed, like a held breath. Ullén has a superb ear for tonal gradation — his half-pedaling in the Consolations is a small marvel, never sludgy, never dry — and the pairing of the third and fourth Consolations is the emotional center of the whole recital: grave, songful, unhurried, the F-sharp major glow of No. 3 given real weight rather than salon perfume.

The gambit that really pays off, though, is dramaturgical rather than pianistic. Liszt’s “Unstern! Sinistre, disastro” — that terrifying late piece, all diminished harmony and vertigo, written by a man who’d stopped believing the world made sense — segues into Messiaen’s Cantéyodjayâ, and the effect is electric. Both pieces refuse to resolve their own violence. Ullén plays the Messiaen with a rhythmic ferocity that’s almost frightening, the ostinati hammered out with a control that never tips into mere noise… though I’d have liked, once or twice, a bit more air between the attacks, a sense that even cataclysm can breathe.

Is the whole thing a persuasive argument for Liszt-as-proto-Messiaen? Not entirely, and Ullén is too intelligent a performer to oversell it — the notes wisely don’t claim influence, only kinship. But as an evening’s listening it has real intellectual heat, and the BIS engineering (recorded, I’d guess, in that reliably resonant Swedish church acoustic the label favors) gives both composers room to ring without blurring Messiaen’s astringent seconds into mush.

Not a first choice if you want Liszt’s Consolations alone — Arrau’s unhurried nobility or Zimerman’s more recent poise remain benchmarks there — nor the place to start with Messiaen’s birds, where Aimard’s fuller cycles go deeper. But as a conversation between two devout, strange, wildly different imaginations, this disc has more to say than it has any right to. Recommended, with the reservations noted — and with genuine admiration for the nerve of the thing.