Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus

[aukhawk]

Prompted by a couple of recent acquisitions, I'm starting this thread for Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, a suite of 20 pieces for piano solo composed in 1944.

This accompanies other threads here for relatively recent piano epics:
Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues  link to page 5
The 20 Etudes of Philip Glass  link to page 1

An AI-generated summary of Vingt Regards looks like this:

Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus is a 20-movement piano work by French composer Olivier Messiaen, exploring the Nativity through various "gazes" or contemplations on the infant Jesus. Each piece has a unique title, and the cycle is known for its spiritual depth, rhythmic complexity, and innovative use of color and melody, with musical elements inspired by sources such as Indonesian Gamelan music, bird song, and Messiaen's own synesthesia. The work, written in 1944, is a major piece of the 20th-century repertoire, requiring virtuosic pianism and deep interpretive skill.

A longer and more authoritative introduction, with blow-by-blow comments on each movement by Joanna MacGregor, is here:
Notes on Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus
A fascinating and very worth-while 27-minute video analysis of just one movement - Noel - is here on YouTube:
Analysis of Messiaen's Noël

I have found 35 complete recordings - not including YouTube or other video sources - and in the next post I will list them with a few timings.  I have listened to at least parts of about half of those, and when trawling the web there are a few that crop up frequently with positive reviews - these include Yvonne Loriod (of whom more anon, she's listed 3 times below), Joanna MacGregor, Peter Serkin, Steven Osborne, Bertrand Chamayou, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Michel Béroff, and Jean-Rodolphe Kars - but there are many more worthy recordings, as well as a very few (including 3 of the above) that attract negative comment for one reason or another.

The first movement, Regard du Père, is a slow ruminative statement (very beautiful) of one of the main recurring themes, the 'theme of God', and at the composer's marking of 60 beats per, should take about 8 minutes or a few seconds under by my estimation.  Half the pianists listed do indeed come in between 7:30 and 8:30 so it is interesting that Loriod, the dedicatee and moreover an active contributor to the composition process, in her three studio recordings never exceeds about 5:20. She is almost the quickest on record.  Fellow French pianists Muraro and Aimard (both pupils of Loriod incidentally), Beroff and Chamayou, are all similarly quick with Chamayou being the slowest of these at about 6:20.  Beroff's recording was praised by the composer, while Messiaen was effectively the producer for two of Loriod's.
So I find all that a bit puzzling - to my ears the music clearly benefits from being rolled out more slowly, I might almost say the slower the better although the slowest I've heard - 10:10 on a recording by Matthew McCright - does begin to edge towards a "pianist still feeling his way through the score" sort of vibe.

But hey, that's only one movement of twenty and timings aren't everything by any means.
I find that Messiaen in general has only two modes of expression - one is slow, meditative, zen-like - the other is what I think of as "shock and awe".  Furthermore he tends to interleave these two to provide contrast in the longer term - no different really to Haydn going Allegro - Adagio - Presto.  Now this is just me, but in this piano music I find his noisier second mode rather hard to take (though clearly, performers such as Loriod relish it).  So when I listen to Vingt Regards I tend to have a tracklist of only the gentler music - that is Nos. 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19 - with maybe only a couple of the livelier pieces interleaved.  While preparing this I have learned to enjoy Nos. 3, 7, 10 and 14 and will add those into my tracklist for the future.  I realise this cherry-picking would be anathema to many music-lovers and of course it can't be done in the concert hall - but I just see this as an advantage of listening to recordings.

Next up, the list of 35 recordings ...

[aukhawk]

Listed here are 35 complete recordings - not including any video or Youtube recitals - listed in order of duration (1st movement), longest first.  This movement is marked by the composer "Extrêmement lent - Mystérieux avec amour" and a tempo of 60 bpm, which I estimate equates to about 7:55.  Austbo, I read somewhere, plays at 57 bpm.  The other two timings are for movements 10 and 15, both of them pivotal in the suite as a whole.

NB these are TRACK timings, which will include a few seconds of white space at the end of each.
Indented names are those I haven't listened to - yet.  Bellheim and Hill are high on my list.

(NB track timings): Tk1  10   15
Batagov         9:10  11:10   18:09
 Bellheim       8:59   8:50   14:00
 Hill           8:58   9:42   13:07
 Bessette       8:47   9:22   13:33
Guðmundsdóttir  8:38   9:36   12:36   
Hyldig          8:37   9:26   12:28
 Chauveau       8:21   8:52   12:18
Kars            8:16   8:38*  11:20     *tk10 timed sans applause
MacGregor       8:15   9:30   11:12
Osborne         8:12   8:40   11:43
Austbo          8:10   8:50   14:07   
 Serkin         8:10   8:01   12:04
Ogdon           8:04   8:23   12:26
Helmchen        8:01   8:56   11:37

 Heide          7:49  10:07   12:35
 Dominique      7:49   9:36   12:22
 Karkkainen     7:42   9:38   11:13
 Symeonidis     7:33   9:08   11:13
Oliveira        7:33   8:09   10:33
Kodama          7:31   8:09   11:07
Chen            7:20   9:38   13:24
 Harvey         7:17   8:27   12:25
 Ayroles        7:16   8:49   12:41
 Longobardi     6:56   8:44    9:27
Gomez           6:53   9:40   13:50

Chamayou        6:23   8:43   10:18
 Hotta          6:22   9:15   11:12
 Aimard         6:08   8:11   10:04
 Beroff         5:42   8:11    8:38
Loriod 74 Erato 5:29   8:47   10:01
Muraro          5:06   9:08   11:44
Loriod 56 Vega  5:01   8:32   10:41
 Loriod 57 SWR  4:55   8:17    9:40
 Juozapenaite-Eesmaa 4:34 9:17 10:25

[Todd]

Bellheim and Hill are high on my list.

Bellheim is fantastic.