BIS – BIS-CD-1803
A recital program can behave like a shelf, one composer placed beside another because their names fit the available space. Fredrik Ullén’s Liszt and Messiaen program behaves more like a stained-glass window assembled across a century. Light enters through Catholic faith, birdsong, virtuosity, terror, consolation and the piano’s ability to suggest things it cannot literally contain. Liszt’s saints speak to birds and cross violent water. Messiaen’s birds interrupt human time with their own rapid, irregular proclamations. Between them stand six quiet consolations, a vision of disaster and a rhythmic construction whose language seems to have arrived from several civilizations at once. Ullén does not argue that Liszt and Messiaen sound alike. He demonstrates that they kept asking the same instrument to carry messages from beyond its ordinary human scale.
The connection becomes visible before the disc begins. Its cover reproduces the familiar Assisi image of Saint Francis addressing a congregation of birds beneath a tree. Francis extends his hand toward creatures that cannot answer in spoken language, yet the scene assumes communication is taking place. That is also the premise of the recording. Music crosses distances that ordinary explanation cannot. Liszt translates a saint’s sermon and the birds’ response into nineteenth-century piano writing. Messiaen listens to actual birds, transcribes their calls and treats them as musicians whose praise existed before human composition. Ullén then places the two acts of translation beside one another, allowing a medieval miracle, Romantic imagination, twentieth-century ornithology and a modern recording studio to occupy the same listening space.
The program opens with Liszt’s “Sancta Dorothea,” a small devotional piece composed late in his life. It does not begin with the public brilliance most commonly attached to his name. There are no crashing octaves announcing the arrival of the greatest travelling piano celebrity of the nineteenth century. Instead, Ullén gives us a few minutes of poised, luminous writing, closer to a prayer card than a monument. The piece establishes that Liszt’s religion was not merely an ornamental subject added to virtuoso music. In his later years, faith increasingly altered the scale, harmony and social purpose of what he wrote. The piano could still produce grandeur, but it could also kneel.
“Sancta Dorothea” is especially effective as an entrance because it makes attention small before the larger miracles arrive. Ullén plays it without exaggerating its innocence. The melody is clear, the harmonies are allowed to glow and fade, and the silences retain enough weight to prevent the piece from becoming decorative sweetness. Liszt’s devotional miniatures can sound fragile beside his large works, but here fragility is their purpose. A prayer does not become more sincere by being shouted.
The first of the two Franciscan legends, “Saint Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds,” begins with the piano discovering how to become an aviary. High-register figures flicker and repeat, not as a generalized pastoral atmosphere but as distinct small presences, each moving according to its own nervous intelligence. Liszt was not attempting scientific transcription in Messiaen’s later sense. His birds belong partly to nature and partly to religious narrative, but the piano writing already recognizes something important: birds do not organize sound according to human song form. Their phrases begin suddenly, repeat unevenly, scatter and reappear from another point in the air.
When Saint Francis enters, the register and rhetorical weight change. The piano acquires a human speaking voice beneath the activity of the birds, and the piece becomes a conversation between unlike orders of creation. Liszt’s virtuosity serves a narrative rather than a circus. Rapid figuration is not displayed merely because the pianist can execute it; it creates the living field through which the saint’s message must travel. Ullén keeps the bird figures crisp without making them mechanical, while the heavier chordal writing arrives with warmth instead of institutional authority. Francis does not command the birds into silence. He joins their praise.
This is where the album’s central idea becomes more than an ingenious programming trick. For both Liszt and Messiaen, birds represented a form of music that could be heard as spiritually meaningful without needing human words. Liszt’s saint recognizes them as fellow beings capable of receiving and returning praise. Messiaen would later regard birds as master musicians, sources of color, rhythm, joy and divine evidence. The composers differ enormously in method, yet both refuse the assumption that human language possesses exclusive access to meaning.
Messiaen’s first robin follows Liszt’s sermon almost as though one of the birds has stepped forward to provide its own account. The sudden transition is astonishing. Liszt’s feathered ornaments give way to a far more angular and concentrated creature. Messiaen’s bird is not a charming melody perched politely above accompaniment. It occupies the keyboard through sharp attacks, brilliant chordal colors and compressed gestures that seem to alter direction before the ear has finished registering them. The piano is no longer imitating a bird from a human distance. It is being reorganized around the bird’s perception of time.
Ullén then begins interweaving Messiaen’s six “Petites esquisses d’oiseaux” with Liszt’s six “Consolations.” This decision dismantles the sealed integrity of two established cycles in order to reveal a third structure hidden between them. A robin calls, then Liszt answers with a short inward song. A blackbird enters, followed by another consolation. Later movements arrive in pairs, but the general alternation remains: wild utterance and human reflection, feathered urgency and lyrical rest, a world that does not need us followed by music created to soothe us.
The “Consolations” are among Liszt’s most accessible piano works, but accessibility can disguise their strangeness. These pieces do not solve suffering. They create temporary rooms inside it. Their melodies often seem simple enough to have existed before the composer found them, yet their harmonies produce slight changes of emotional gravity beneath the surface. Ullén resists turning them into sentimental postcards. He keeps the lines moving, allowing tenderness without drowning the music in perfume.
The first two consolations are brief enough to feel like responses spoken by someone who understands that too much language can damage comfort. After Messiaen’s abrupt birds, Liszt’s phrases seem almost impossibly patient. Time returns to the scale of breath. Yet the juxtaposition also changes Liszt. What might ordinarily sound like conventional Romantic repose begins to resemble the human nervous system recovering after contact with another mode of existence.
Messiaen’s blackbird is darker, more abrupt and more theatrical than the robin. Chords act as flashes of color rather than merely harmony, and the bird’s call appears to carve openings into them. Messiaen often heard harmony visually, associating combinations of pitch with highly specific colors, but even without sharing his synesthetic experience, a listener can sense that the piano is being treated as a source of illuminated surfaces. Ullén’s precision matters because a blurred attack would change not only the rhythm but the apparent color of the event. Each note must arrive with the force and exact placement of a mark in a mosaic.
The second consolation then returns with slightly more motion, as though the human reply has acquired confidence from listening. This is one of the recital’s quiet achievements. The alternation does not merely reveal similarities between composers. It changes how each is heard. Messiaen makes Liszt sound more modern, exposing the unusual harmonic implications beneath his singing lines. Liszt makes Messiaen sound less forbiddingly modern, revealing that his compressed birdsong still participates in older traditions of depiction, devotion and ecstatic pianism.
The third robin and the song thrush are heard consecutively, creating a miniature habitat before Liszt’s third and fourth consolations arrive together. The robin returns throughout Messiaen’s set, but repetition does not produce a stable character. Each appearance changes according to surrounding chords, register and density. The bird becomes a recurring witness, present at different points in the landscape rather than a theme undergoing conventional development.
The song thrush offers another kind of pattern. Its repeated fragments can sound obsessive to human ears, yet the repetition is alive with tiny changes of placement and intensity. Messiaen understood that natural sound is not the opposite of structure. Nature is full of structures that do not care whether they resemble human composition. His achievement was not simply to copy bird calls, but to allow their rhythmic behavior to challenge inherited ideas about what musical continuity should feel like.
Liszt’s third consolation, the famous D-flat-major Lento placido, supplies the broadest lyrical release in the interwoven sequence. It is often compared to a Chopin nocturne, and the resemblance is audible in its floating melody and gently articulated accompaniment, but Ullén prevents it from becoming an imitation of someone else’s intimacy. Coming after Messiaen, its flowing line sounds almost miraculous. Human melody reappears not as a default language but as one possible form among many.
The fourth consolation is shorter and more restrained, functioning almost as an afterimage of the third. Together they suggest that consolation can arrive in different proportions. Sometimes it unfolds as a full song, giving emotion enough time to breathe. Sometimes it is a small gesture that does not remove distress but places a hand beside it.
Messiaen’s final robin and skylark then reopen the sky. The skylark is especially important because its song is inseparable from vertical movement. The bird rises while singing, and Messiaen’s music seems to circle an invisible high point, repeatedly punctuated by heavier notes that alter the scale beneath it. The piano cannot fly, but it can make altitude audible. Ullén’s control allows the bright upper-register activity to remain articulate even as the writing becomes intensely concentrated.
Liszt’s fifth and sixth consolations complete the central exchange. By now the word “consolation” has changed meaning. At the beginning, it might have suggested private comfort after grief. After the birds, it begins to sound like a human attempt to remain in relationship with a creation that exceeds human understanding. The final consolation’s gentle singing quality does not conquer the wild rhythmic world Messiaen has revealed. It accepts a place within it.
The program could have ended there as an elegant meditation on birds, prayer and repose. Instead, Ullén opens the ground beneath it with “Unstern! Sinistre, disastro.” This late Liszt piece appears to come from a different century than the “Consolations,” although it emerged from the same composer’s final years. The title accumulates words for calamity, an ill star, something sinister, disaster, and the music refuses the expected comforts of Romantic harmony. Tritones, whole-tone movement, blunt repeated figures and unstable tonal relationships create a landscape in which the piano no longer sings reassuringly about suffering. It has entered the machinery of dread.
Late Liszt can feel prophetic because he abandoned many of the devices that had made his earlier music publicly persuasive. Harmony becomes bare, motion becomes awkward, endings cease to provide secure arrival. “Unstern!” does not sound as though Liszt has discovered twentieth-century music ahead of schedule through clever prediction. It sounds as though age, grief and spiritual uncertainty forced him to remove anything he could no longer believe.
Ullén plays the piece without smoothing its ugliness into atmospheric modernism. The attacks retain their severity, and the repeated material feels stubborn rather than grand. This matters because “Unstern!” is not simply a dramatic contrast inserted before Messiaen. It reveals the fracture inside Liszt himself. The same musician who composed consolations and miracles also imagined a world whose harmonic stars no longer provided navigation.
Messiaen’s “Cantéyodjayâ” follows, and the recital’s carefully cultivated garden erupts into rhythmic architecture. The title is assembled from terms associated with Indian musical theory, and the piece draws on Messiaen’s long study of Hindu rhythmic patterns. Yet it should not be heard merely as an exercise in imported rhythmic material. Messiaen takes sequences, durations, accents, recurring blocks and violently contrasting textures, then organizes them according to a logic that refuses ordinary narrative development. Material returns because it has ritual identity, not because it has been smoothly transformed.
The piece contains passages of almost cartoonish force beside crystalline flashes and dense chordal monuments. It can sound ceremonial, mechanical, ecstatic and physically awkward within seconds. Ullén’s experience in technically extreme modern repertoire is essential here. The challenge is not only playing the notes. It is preserving the independent identity of several kinds of musical time while preventing the whole structure from collapsing into generalized complexity.
“Cantéyodjayâ” also exposes a fascinating difference between Messiaen and Liszt. Liszt often makes virtuosity sound like transformation: an idea begins in one state, gathers force and arrives somewhere enlarged. Messiaen can make virtuosity sound like simultaneity: several complete realities exist beside or on top of one another, and the pianist must reveal their collision without pretending they form a single smooth journey. Ullén is convincing in both systems. He can shape Liszt’s long rhetorical rise, then switch to Messiaen’s block-like constructions without forcing one composer’s grammar upon the other.
The pairing of “Unstern!” and “Cantéyodjayâ” becomes the album’s dark central furnace. Both pieces reject comfortable continuity, but they do so for different reasons. Liszt’s discontinuity feels like a world losing its former order. Messiaen’s feels like the arrival of an order too complex to be measured by familiar means. One looks into disaster; the other assembles time from materials that seem ancient, modern and outside history at once.
The final work returns to Liszt and Saint Francis, but not to the gentle congregation of birds. “Saint Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves” depicts a miracle of passage. According to the legend, the saint was refused transport across the Strait of Messina, so he spread his cloak upon the water, used his staff as a sail and crossed without the boatman’s help. Liszt converts the story into an enormous increase of resistance and faith. The water is not a decorative backdrop. It surges through repeated figures and escalating waves of sound, while the saint’s theme persists against it.
This is virtuosity restored to its most public scale, but the narrative changes its meaning. The pianist’s labor becomes the sea’s resistance. Repeated notes, octaves and accumulating sonority are not trophies placed before an audience. They are the material through which steadfast movement must occur. Ullén maintains enough rhythmic clarity that the waves remain active rather than becoming a continuous roar. The miracle is convincing because the obstacle is allowed to feel powerful.
Ending with this legend completes the recital’s spiritual geography. It began with a small saintly image, moved into communication between species, entered human consolation, confronted disaster, passed through a massive rhythmic construction and finally stepped onto unstable water. Faith is not represented as passive certainty. It is attention, endurance and movement across conditions that do not promise support.
The two Saint Francis pieces also frame different relationships between holiness and nature. In the first, Francis listens and speaks to birds, joining a living chorus. In the second, he confronts an element that could destroy him. Nature is neither sentimentalized nor treated as an enemy. It contains praise and danger. The spiritual person is not removed from creation but placed more deeply inside its demands.
Ullén’s own position adds another quiet dimension. He is not only a pianist associated with exceptionally demanding repertoire but also a neuroscientist who has studied musical training and the brain. It would be too easy to turn that biography into a slogan, claiming that science explains his playing or that performance proves his science. More interesting is the fact that this recital repeatedly asks how different systems of perception can coexist. Human song, birdsong, prayer, color, rhythmic mathematics, bodily technique and recorded sound all meet through the nervous system of one performer.
The recording was made at Nybrokajen 11 in Stockholm during sessions in April and June 2009, although BIS did not release it until 2012. The recorded piano has clarity without clinical coldness. Individual attacks remain sharply legible in Messiaen, while Liszt’s sustained harmonies are given enough surrounding air to bloom. This balance is crucial to the concept. Too much reverberation would blur the birds and rhythmic structures; too little would deprive the consolations and legends of spiritual space.
The three-year distance between recording and release also gives the album the feeling of a carefully considered object rather than a quickly documented recital. Its seventy-two minutes have been sequenced as one large composition made from separate works. The listener is not merely invited to compare two composers. The listener passes through a designed alternation of scale and consciousness.
What the program finally reveals is not simple influence. Messiaen did not need to resemble Liszt in order to continue a possibility Liszt had opened. Both composers treated the piano as more than a mechanism for producing notes. It could become an orchestra, chapel, landscape, aviary, storm, color field and machine for testing the limits of time. Both joined extreme technical knowledge to religious imagination. Neither believed that spiritual music had to be quiet, polite or reassuring.
Their faith also did not protect them from darkness. Liszt’s late catastrophe remains catastrophe. Messiaen’s radiant Catholic certainty coexists with violence, dissonance and rhythmic structures capable of making ordinary human time feel unstable. Belief here is not an escape from complexity. It is the reason complexity must be faced.
The cover’s birds therefore do more than advertise the most charming portion of the program. They represent creatures receiving a message that human beings cannot verify in ordinary terms. Did they understand Saint Francis? Does the piano resemble their songs? Can a composer translate divine joy into rhythm and color? The album does not prove any of this. It makes a space where the questions become audible.
Ullén’s greatest contribution is his refusal to explain the pairing through performance gimmicks. Liszt remains Liszt, with his rhetoric, lyricism, theatrical scale and late harmonic corrosion. Messiaen remains Messiaen, with his birds, colors, discontinuities and ritualized rhythm. The bridge is created through placement, touch and listening. One piece changes the atmosphere into which the next is born.
By the final waves, the recital has made consolation itself feel less like safety and more like the courage to continue hearing. The birds sing whether we understand them or not. Disaster interrupts the map. Rhythm exceeds the body. Water refuses to become a road. Yet Saint Francis steps forward, and the pianist follows him across.
The connection becomes visible before the disc begins. Its cover reproduces the familiar Assisi image of Saint Francis addressing a congregation of birds beneath a tree. Francis extends his hand toward creatures that cannot answer in spoken language, yet the scene assumes communication is taking place. That is also the premise of the recording. Music crosses distances that ordinary explanation cannot. Liszt translates a saint’s sermon and the birds’ response into nineteenth-century piano writing. Messiaen listens to actual birds, transcribes their calls and treats them as musicians whose praise existed before human composition. Ullén then places the two acts of translation beside one another, allowing a medieval miracle, Romantic imagination, twentieth-century ornithology and a modern recording studio to occupy the same listening space.
The program opens with Liszt’s “Sancta Dorothea,” a small devotional piece composed late in his life. It does not begin with the public brilliance most commonly attached to his name. There are no crashing octaves announcing the arrival of the greatest travelling piano celebrity of the nineteenth century. Instead, Ullén gives us a few minutes of poised, luminous writing, closer to a prayer card than a monument. The piece establishes that Liszt’s religion was not merely an ornamental subject added to virtuoso music. In his later years, faith increasingly altered the scale, harmony and social purpose of what he wrote. The piano could still produce grandeur, but it could also kneel.
“Sancta Dorothea” is especially effective as an entrance because it makes attention small before the larger miracles arrive. Ullén plays it without exaggerating its innocence. The melody is clear, the harmonies are allowed to glow and fade, and the silences retain enough weight to prevent the piece from becoming decorative sweetness. Liszt’s devotional miniatures can sound fragile beside his large works, but here fragility is their purpose. A prayer does not become more sincere by being shouted.
The first of the two Franciscan legends, “Saint Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds,” begins with the piano discovering how to become an aviary. High-register figures flicker and repeat, not as a generalized pastoral atmosphere but as distinct small presences, each moving according to its own nervous intelligence. Liszt was not attempting scientific transcription in Messiaen’s later sense. His birds belong partly to nature and partly to religious narrative, but the piano writing already recognizes something important: birds do not organize sound according to human song form. Their phrases begin suddenly, repeat unevenly, scatter and reappear from another point in the air.
When Saint Francis enters, the register and rhetorical weight change. The piano acquires a human speaking voice beneath the activity of the birds, and the piece becomes a conversation between unlike orders of creation. Liszt’s virtuosity serves a narrative rather than a circus. Rapid figuration is not displayed merely because the pianist can execute it; it creates the living field through which the saint’s message must travel. Ullén keeps the bird figures crisp without making them mechanical, while the heavier chordal writing arrives with warmth instead of institutional authority. Francis does not command the birds into silence. He joins their praise.
This is where the album’s central idea becomes more than an ingenious programming trick. For both Liszt and Messiaen, birds represented a form of music that could be heard as spiritually meaningful without needing human words. Liszt’s saint recognizes them as fellow beings capable of receiving and returning praise. Messiaen would later regard birds as master musicians, sources of color, rhythm, joy and divine evidence. The composers differ enormously in method, yet both refuse the assumption that human language possesses exclusive access to meaning.
Messiaen’s first robin follows Liszt’s sermon almost as though one of the birds has stepped forward to provide its own account. The sudden transition is astonishing. Liszt’s feathered ornaments give way to a far more angular and concentrated creature. Messiaen’s bird is not a charming melody perched politely above accompaniment. It occupies the keyboard through sharp attacks, brilliant chordal colors and compressed gestures that seem to alter direction before the ear has finished registering them. The piano is no longer imitating a bird from a human distance. It is being reorganized around the bird’s perception of time.
Ullén then begins interweaving Messiaen’s six “Petites esquisses d’oiseaux” with Liszt’s six “Consolations.” This decision dismantles the sealed integrity of two established cycles in order to reveal a third structure hidden between them. A robin calls, then Liszt answers with a short inward song. A blackbird enters, followed by another consolation. Later movements arrive in pairs, but the general alternation remains: wild utterance and human reflection, feathered urgency and lyrical rest, a world that does not need us followed by music created to soothe us.
The “Consolations” are among Liszt’s most accessible piano works, but accessibility can disguise their strangeness. These pieces do not solve suffering. They create temporary rooms inside it. Their melodies often seem simple enough to have existed before the composer found them, yet their harmonies produce slight changes of emotional gravity beneath the surface. Ullén resists turning them into sentimental postcards. He keeps the lines moving, allowing tenderness without drowning the music in perfume.
The first two consolations are brief enough to feel like responses spoken by someone who understands that too much language can damage comfort. After Messiaen’s abrupt birds, Liszt’s phrases seem almost impossibly patient. Time returns to the scale of breath. Yet the juxtaposition also changes Liszt. What might ordinarily sound like conventional Romantic repose begins to resemble the human nervous system recovering after contact with another mode of existence.
Messiaen’s blackbird is darker, more abrupt and more theatrical than the robin. Chords act as flashes of color rather than merely harmony, and the bird’s call appears to carve openings into them. Messiaen often heard harmony visually, associating combinations of pitch with highly specific colors, but even without sharing his synesthetic experience, a listener can sense that the piano is being treated as a source of illuminated surfaces. Ullén’s precision matters because a blurred attack would change not only the rhythm but the apparent color of the event. Each note must arrive with the force and exact placement of a mark in a mosaic.
The second consolation then returns with slightly more motion, as though the human reply has acquired confidence from listening. This is one of the recital’s quiet achievements. The alternation does not merely reveal similarities between composers. It changes how each is heard. Messiaen makes Liszt sound more modern, exposing the unusual harmonic implications beneath his singing lines. Liszt makes Messiaen sound less forbiddingly modern, revealing that his compressed birdsong still participates in older traditions of depiction, devotion and ecstatic pianism.
The third robin and the song thrush are heard consecutively, creating a miniature habitat before Liszt’s third and fourth consolations arrive together. The robin returns throughout Messiaen’s set, but repetition does not produce a stable character. Each appearance changes according to surrounding chords, register and density. The bird becomes a recurring witness, present at different points in the landscape rather than a theme undergoing conventional development.
The song thrush offers another kind of pattern. Its repeated fragments can sound obsessive to human ears, yet the repetition is alive with tiny changes of placement and intensity. Messiaen understood that natural sound is not the opposite of structure. Nature is full of structures that do not care whether they resemble human composition. His achievement was not simply to copy bird calls, but to allow their rhythmic behavior to challenge inherited ideas about what musical continuity should feel like.
Liszt’s third consolation, the famous D-flat-major Lento placido, supplies the broadest lyrical release in the interwoven sequence. It is often compared to a Chopin nocturne, and the resemblance is audible in its floating melody and gently articulated accompaniment, but Ullén prevents it from becoming an imitation of someone else’s intimacy. Coming after Messiaen, its flowing line sounds almost miraculous. Human melody reappears not as a default language but as one possible form among many.
The fourth consolation is shorter and more restrained, functioning almost as an afterimage of the third. Together they suggest that consolation can arrive in different proportions. Sometimes it unfolds as a full song, giving emotion enough time to breathe. Sometimes it is a small gesture that does not remove distress but places a hand beside it.
Messiaen’s final robin and skylark then reopen the sky. The skylark is especially important because its song is inseparable from vertical movement. The bird rises while singing, and Messiaen’s music seems to circle an invisible high point, repeatedly punctuated by heavier notes that alter the scale beneath it. The piano cannot fly, but it can make altitude audible. Ullén’s control allows the bright upper-register activity to remain articulate even as the writing becomes intensely concentrated.
Liszt’s fifth and sixth consolations complete the central exchange. By now the word “consolation” has changed meaning. At the beginning, it might have suggested private comfort after grief. After the birds, it begins to sound like a human attempt to remain in relationship with a creation that exceeds human understanding. The final consolation’s gentle singing quality does not conquer the wild rhythmic world Messiaen has revealed. It accepts a place within it.
The program could have ended there as an elegant meditation on birds, prayer and repose. Instead, Ullén opens the ground beneath it with “Unstern! Sinistre, disastro.” This late Liszt piece appears to come from a different century than the “Consolations,” although it emerged from the same composer’s final years. The title accumulates words for calamity, an ill star, something sinister, disaster, and the music refuses the expected comforts of Romantic harmony. Tritones, whole-tone movement, blunt repeated figures and unstable tonal relationships create a landscape in which the piano no longer sings reassuringly about suffering. It has entered the machinery of dread.
Late Liszt can feel prophetic because he abandoned many of the devices that had made his earlier music publicly persuasive. Harmony becomes bare, motion becomes awkward, endings cease to provide secure arrival. “Unstern!” does not sound as though Liszt has discovered twentieth-century music ahead of schedule through clever prediction. It sounds as though age, grief and spiritual uncertainty forced him to remove anything he could no longer believe.
Ullén plays the piece without smoothing its ugliness into atmospheric modernism. The attacks retain their severity, and the repeated material feels stubborn rather than grand. This matters because “Unstern!” is not simply a dramatic contrast inserted before Messiaen. It reveals the fracture inside Liszt himself. The same musician who composed consolations and miracles also imagined a world whose harmonic stars no longer provided navigation.
Messiaen’s “Cantéyodjayâ” follows, and the recital’s carefully cultivated garden erupts into rhythmic architecture. The title is assembled from terms associated with Indian musical theory, and the piece draws on Messiaen’s long study of Hindu rhythmic patterns. Yet it should not be heard merely as an exercise in imported rhythmic material. Messiaen takes sequences, durations, accents, recurring blocks and violently contrasting textures, then organizes them according to a logic that refuses ordinary narrative development. Material returns because it has ritual identity, not because it has been smoothly transformed.
The piece contains passages of almost cartoonish force beside crystalline flashes and dense chordal monuments. It can sound ceremonial, mechanical, ecstatic and physically awkward within seconds. Ullén’s experience in technically extreme modern repertoire is essential here. The challenge is not only playing the notes. It is preserving the independent identity of several kinds of musical time while preventing the whole structure from collapsing into generalized complexity.
“Cantéyodjayâ” also exposes a fascinating difference between Messiaen and Liszt. Liszt often makes virtuosity sound like transformation: an idea begins in one state, gathers force and arrives somewhere enlarged. Messiaen can make virtuosity sound like simultaneity: several complete realities exist beside or on top of one another, and the pianist must reveal their collision without pretending they form a single smooth journey. Ullén is convincing in both systems. He can shape Liszt’s long rhetorical rise, then switch to Messiaen’s block-like constructions without forcing one composer’s grammar upon the other.
The pairing of “Unstern!” and “Cantéyodjayâ” becomes the album’s dark central furnace. Both pieces reject comfortable continuity, but they do so for different reasons. Liszt’s discontinuity feels like a world losing its former order. Messiaen’s feels like the arrival of an order too complex to be measured by familiar means. One looks into disaster; the other assembles time from materials that seem ancient, modern and outside history at once.
The final work returns to Liszt and Saint Francis, but not to the gentle congregation of birds. “Saint Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves” depicts a miracle of passage. According to the legend, the saint was refused transport across the Strait of Messina, so he spread his cloak upon the water, used his staff as a sail and crossed without the boatman’s help. Liszt converts the story into an enormous increase of resistance and faith. The water is not a decorative backdrop. It surges through repeated figures and escalating waves of sound, while the saint’s theme persists against it.
This is virtuosity restored to its most public scale, but the narrative changes its meaning. The pianist’s labor becomes the sea’s resistance. Repeated notes, octaves and accumulating sonority are not trophies placed before an audience. They are the material through which steadfast movement must occur. Ullén maintains enough rhythmic clarity that the waves remain active rather than becoming a continuous roar. The miracle is convincing because the obstacle is allowed to feel powerful.
Ending with this legend completes the recital’s spiritual geography. It began with a small saintly image, moved into communication between species, entered human consolation, confronted disaster, passed through a massive rhythmic construction and finally stepped onto unstable water. Faith is not represented as passive certainty. It is attention, endurance and movement across conditions that do not promise support.
The two Saint Francis pieces also frame different relationships between holiness and nature. In the first, Francis listens and speaks to birds, joining a living chorus. In the second, he confronts an element that could destroy him. Nature is neither sentimentalized nor treated as an enemy. It contains praise and danger. The spiritual person is not removed from creation but placed more deeply inside its demands.
Ullén’s own position adds another quiet dimension. He is not only a pianist associated with exceptionally demanding repertoire but also a neuroscientist who has studied musical training and the brain. It would be too easy to turn that biography into a slogan, claiming that science explains his playing or that performance proves his science. More interesting is the fact that this recital repeatedly asks how different systems of perception can coexist. Human song, birdsong, prayer, color, rhythmic mathematics, bodily technique and recorded sound all meet through the nervous system of one performer.
The recording was made at Nybrokajen 11 in Stockholm during sessions in April and June 2009, although BIS did not release it until 2012. The recorded piano has clarity without clinical coldness. Individual attacks remain sharply legible in Messiaen, while Liszt’s sustained harmonies are given enough surrounding air to bloom. This balance is crucial to the concept. Too much reverberation would blur the birds and rhythmic structures; too little would deprive the consolations and legends of spiritual space.
The three-year distance between recording and release also gives the album the feeling of a carefully considered object rather than a quickly documented recital. Its seventy-two minutes have been sequenced as one large composition made from separate works. The listener is not merely invited to compare two composers. The listener passes through a designed alternation of scale and consciousness.
What the program finally reveals is not simple influence. Messiaen did not need to resemble Liszt in order to continue a possibility Liszt had opened. Both composers treated the piano as more than a mechanism for producing notes. It could become an orchestra, chapel, landscape, aviary, storm, color field and machine for testing the limits of time. Both joined extreme technical knowledge to religious imagination. Neither believed that spiritual music had to be quiet, polite or reassuring.
Their faith also did not protect them from darkness. Liszt’s late catastrophe remains catastrophe. Messiaen’s radiant Catholic certainty coexists with violence, dissonance and rhythmic structures capable of making ordinary human time feel unstable. Belief here is not an escape from complexity. It is the reason complexity must be faced.
The cover’s birds therefore do more than advertise the most charming portion of the program. They represent creatures receiving a message that human beings cannot verify in ordinary terms. Did they understand Saint Francis? Does the piano resemble their songs? Can a composer translate divine joy into rhythm and color? The album does not prove any of this. It makes a space where the questions become audible.
Ullén’s greatest contribution is his refusal to explain the pairing through performance gimmicks. Liszt remains Liszt, with his rhetoric, lyricism, theatrical scale and late harmonic corrosion. Messiaen remains Messiaen, with his birds, colors, discontinuities and ritualized rhythm. The bridge is created through placement, touch and listening. One piece changes the atmosphere into which the next is born.
By the final waves, the recital has made consolation itself feel less like safety and more like the courage to continue hearing. The birds sing whether we understand them or not. Disaster interrupts the map. Rhythm exceeds the body. Water refuses to become a road. Yet Saint Francis steps forward, and the pianist follows him across.
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