Messiaen: Vingt regards sur lEnfant-Jésus – Knapik

Some recordings sit on a shelf so long they start to feel like rumors. This one is real, finally, and it lands with the force of buried treasure exhumed rather than merely released.

Eugeniusz Knapik made this release of Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus in 1979, in Poland, under circumstances that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with politics — martial law, censorship, the whole grinding machinery of a state that had other priorities than a young pianist’s tribute to a French mystic. The tapes sat. Sat through the collapse of the Soviet order, sat through the decades in which Knapik himself moved toward composition and became better known as one of the “Stalowa Wola generation” of Polish composers than as a pianist at all. Now, at last, we get to hear what started it — a document, we’re told, born out of a 1969 Warsaw recital by John Ogdon that seems to have knocked the younger man sideways.

I believe it. You can hear the imprint of that encounter in the sheer physical conviction of the playing, though Knapik is very much his own artist and not an Ogdon imitator — thank goodness, since Ogdon’s own recorded legacy in this piece, marvelous as it is in places, isn’t beyond reproach in matters of pacing.

Messiaen’s cycle — completed in 1944, in the thick of the Occupation, though you’d never guess from the music itself that France was starving and terrified — remains one of the true monuments of the piano literature of the last century. Two hours, more or less, of contemplation (I’ll use that word rather than “gazes,” though the booklet’s translation isn’t wrong) on the mystery of the Incarnation. Bell sounds. Birdsong. Harmonic fields so dense with major sevenths and added sixths that the ear has to relearn, movement by movement, how consonance can ache. Whether you come to this music devout or utterly secular scarcely matters — Messiaen himself would have said it mattered a great deal, but the musical logic holds regardless of what you believe walking in.

Knapik’s gift here is architectural. He understands — and this is not a given, even among distinguished interpreters — that the cycle’s twenty movements are not twenty separate essays but stations along a single arc. “Regard du Père,” the opening, emerges from near-silence with a species of patience I associate with much older pianists; there’s no rush to establish personality. Compare that with the ecstatic violence he unleashes in “Par Lui tout a été fait,” where the fugal writing turns positively feral under his hands — attacks landing with a percussive edge that never once turns ugly or clangorous, which is a real trick given how thickly Messiaen voices his climaxes.

The “Regard de l’Esprit de joie” has a swing to it, an irregular exuberant lopsidedness, that tells you Knapik has internalized Messiaen’s rhythmic language — those added values, that Hindu-derived deçi-tâlas vocabulary the composer drew from Sharngadeva — rather than merely counting his way through it. And “Regard des anges,” often played for glitter alone, gets something darker and stranger from him, a nervous energy underneath the toccata figuration.

Where does this leave the classic recordings? Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s second wife and the pianist for whom the piece was effectively written — her fingerprints are all over its virtuosity — made three recordings over her career; the 1973 Erato remains for many listeners the reference, unimpeachable in its authority, if occasionally a shade didactic, as though she’s teaching the score even as she plays it. Peter Serkin’s account has real poetry. Håkan Austbø, cooler and more analytical, has his partisans. And Steven Osborne’s 2001 Hyperion set is, by common consent, among the finest things achieved in this repertoire by a pianist of his generation — luminous, structurally acute, gorgeously engineered.

I deliberately didn’t reach for Osborne while preparing to hear him live; I reached for Knapik instead, curious what an unknown quantity might reveal. What it revealed is a pianist of real stature who, for reasons having nothing to do with talent, simply vanished from this repertoire’s historical record for forty-odd years. That’s a loss worth mourning and, now, a wrong worth celebrating being righted.

The engineering is dry, close, occasionally a bit boxy — this was 1979 Polish radio technology, not Windmill Lane — but it doesn’t obscure the tonal range Knapik draws from what must have been a decent if unglamorous instrument. There’s no glamour-photography of sound here, no audiophile sheen. What there is: conviction, structural intelligence, and a pianist clearly playing for his life, or at least for something larger than a contract.

Not a first choice above Loriod or Osborne, if you can own only one recording. But an essential second — or third — for anyone who loves this extraordinary piece and wants to hear it argued afresh, by a voice that history nearly erased.