Only when the audience is finally fully attentive does pianist Bertrand Chamayou give it his all

The 35-year-old very religious pianist Olivier Messiaen must have had fresh memories of the German camp in which he was held captive as a French soldier when he wrote his enormous piano work in 1944. Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus composed: the child Jesus viewed in twenty ways. From ‘the Father’ (1), from ‘the heights’ (8), from ‘time’ (9), from ‘the angels’ (14) and from ‘the silence’ (17), to name a few to call. When you think of religious music you may think of splendor, pageantry and perfection, but not music innovator Messiaen. He ‘suffered’ from synaesthesia; saw colors in sound, and sculpted color fields with chords and self-invented scales that only he could see. That rarely produces sweet, bite-sized sounds. It means great contrasts, wild rhythms and an extensive palette of timbres. Messiaen’s mystical faith takes place in a world that is imperfect, wild and dissonant.

The pianist who takes the plunge signs up for a two-hour tour de force that demands all extremes. Bertrand Chamayou set ‘Vingt regards’ in 2022 on CDand played it on Saturday in the Amsterdam Music Building.

The audience in the hall starts restless. Coughing, candy wrappers, a messy bag being searched, even someone hissing out loud that he ‘can’t see anything’. There are musicians who demand attention by playing more intensely. Chamayou doesn’t do that. He plays with a remarkably light tension on the already thin-sounding grand piano. “If you want to be part of the story, you have to get involved yourself,” he seems to say. A bit like the school teacher who doesn’t rant, but waits in silence until the class is quiet. Only when Chamayou has the entire room on edge after a few ‘regards’ does he increase the tension. Fascinating and effective.

It is incredible how he works his way through the music physically, but also mentally. Where beauty shines through, it is the softly struck dissonant tone with which it still keeps you on your guard. He makes Messiaen’s free rhythms sound wavering with wonderful subtlety in the ‘Contemplation of the Virgin’ (4). ‘The Kiss of the Child Jesus’ (15) sounds tender and comforting, but also slightly bitter, after the great stories in the pieces before it. A highlight is the chaos of notes representing matter before creation in ‘Par Lui tout a été fait’ (‘Through Him all things were created’) (6); Chamayou slowly but surely forces them into line, but in the meantime manages to make it sound as if the notes offer great resistance. Apparently, only with the greatest effort from ‘Him’ will it be possible to create order. The fact that the grand piano sometimes just seems to hold up, with a few mid-high tones fluttering at the hardest touches, helps in this regard.

Pieces like Vingt regards also demand the utmost from you as a listener. The obligation to sit through the two hours breaks you down – but it is the good musicians like Chamayou who gradually build you up again; partly as yourself, partly as a Picasso. That’s exhausting, but after a few hours of stunned recovery time, it’s also wonderfully exhilarating.

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