​A hallucinatory experience

​ The award winning organist Geerten van de Wetering performs Messiaen’s organ cycle La Nativité du Seigneur. His performance is accompanied by spectacular projections on his organ. They show the colours that Messiaen composed in his music. He possessed the gift of synaesthesia: for every timbre and chord he saw a matching colour. To bring the colour spectrum of his music to life, Marcel Wierckx built an ingenious video installation. A hallucinatory experience, in sound and image. In the monumental Kloosterkerk.

The live generated video images are based on the nine pastel drawings the French painter Charles Blanc-Gatti (1890-1966) made on the occasion of one of the first performances of La Nativité du Seigneur in 1936. Blanc-Gatti, a friend of Messiaen, was one of the founders of Musicalism, an art movement in which painters translated sounds and music into visual art.