Angels and Heavenly Order

Angels are seen as messengers between heaven and earth. In this concert they appear in many guises: as fallen angels who bring the light, as guardian angels and as angels rejoicing.

The evening begins in darkness. The Ninth Sonata by Alexander Scriabin was nicknamed the ‘Black Mass’: music that begins softly and mysteriously and gradually bursts into flame. Violinist Shannon Lee plays the spellbinding Second Sonata by Eugène Ysaÿe, in which the Dies irae keeps surfacing: the Gregorian chant about the Day of Judgement.

The light breaks through in Angel by Maxim Shalygin, written in memory of the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, and in the Passacaglia with which Heinrich Biber concluded his Rosary Sonatas around 1676. Above the music is an engraving of a guardian angel taking a child by the hand.

After the interval, Ellen Corver and Antonii Baryshevskyi play Visions de l’Amen by Olivier Messiaen. He wrote it in occupied Paris in 1943, for himself and the then nineteen-year-old pianist Yvonne Loriod, who would later become his wife. In seven Amens the whole of creation passes by: stars and planets, angels, saints and birds, desire and the Last Judgement. With ecstatic splendour of sound, Messiaen conjures it all from the two grand pianos.