Geerten van de Wetering, Marcel Wierckx, Johan Luijmes

Rondom Messiaen

Dreaming like Messiaen

Past

Performers

  • Geerten van de Wetering organ
  • Marcel Wierckx video projections
  • Johan Luijmes visual design

Programme

  • Olivier MessiaenLa Nativité du Seigneur (with video projections)

This concert is presented in collaboration with Podium 21.

Messiaen’s kleuren

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.

“I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.”

Olivier Messiaen