It’s wrong to think of half a house as a failure. Hill Auditorium seats 3538. An audience of over 1700 for such challenging music is surely a success. I am grateful to UMS for bringing this show to us; I was happy to hear (and see) even the things I didn’t like, to learn, to be challenged, to have something new to think about, to hear a new kind of beauty. If UMS decides that it will only book shows that sell out, that can sell 3500 tickets, the music that we hear will become much more limited.

I am utterly in awe of this tour. I’ve never seen an orchestra perform so many complex, difficult works in one go. Seeing them performed so well, and seeing them communicated to the audience with such enthusiasm and commitment: this is what orchestral playing should be about, and so rarely is.

Moreover, they’re doing this with composers and pieces that are too often ignored. When Berlin was here a few years ago, they renewed my faith in orchestra playing, but they did it primarily with Brahms. San Francisco has done it again, but with Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and even John Cage. (I’m sure they would have done it with Varèse, which I sadly had to miss.)

Other orchestras (e.g., our own vision-devoid Ann Arbor Symphony) take note: you ignore ambitious programming at your peril. The audience universally *reacted* to these performances. They *listened*. You could feel it in the room. Sure, the reactions weren’t all positive. But many were, and people that hated the absurd randomness of Cage may well have loved the finely crafted soundscapes of Varèse.

The really old stuff can be great, but there’s so much more out there. Real art requires a coevolutionary dialogue among human beings—artists and listeners need to have their brains modified over time!—and that’s what we’ve been seeing this weekend.

I’m with everyone above. Had to keep my eyes closed. This is such extraordinarily rich music that visual imagery can only diminish it – and this stuff was an embarrassment. Messiaen was first and last a church musician, something like more than half a century on the bench at Sainte Trinite, and to separate his work from his faith (as the program notes seemed to do by leaving out the specific biblical referents of each movement) is to betray an extraordinary ignorance of this musician. My reaction to the film was not unlike my reaction to those various ads over the years that use something like the Mozart or the Verdi Requiems to sell cars. To use M’s music as a sound track for anything would be diminishing; to use it for this interminable stretch of cliches (bunnies! tigers! slow-motion eating! acres of trash!) was a travesty. And particularly, given what a terrific performance this was! The pianist was extraordinary, the percussionists amazing, the first horn truly out of this world. So, as long as I kept my eyes closed, I was in heaven. Quite the opposite when otherwise…

On one hand, I wish to express my deep appreciation to UMS for bringing this extraordinary work to the Hill Auditorium stage. I know the piece well and was eagerly anticipating this performance.

Unfortunately, as skilled as the Hamburg Orchestra is, for me and countless others in the audience tonight, the performance was ruined by the utterly foolish “film” that was shown with it.

The more I watched, the more I became convinced that the filmmaker had bought into the preposterous theory being advanced by some that Messiaen was anti-semitic, and as an Israeli, this film was his act of revenge on Messiaen. He clearly strove to fight the music and everything the composer sought to express in it, to make the music seem ugly by combining it with incongruously ugly imagery. I can find no other explanation for such a travesty, other than perhaps sheer, oblivious stupidity.

The program booklet’s commentary on the music conspicuously omitted any reference to Messiaen’s own detailed, thoughtful and thought-provoking commentaries. All specific religious references disappeared, which I’ll assume was an attempt to appeal to predominantly non-religious current European audiences that the Hamburg orchestra plays to at home. Yet most all the composer’s references to the specific natural scenes that so vividly inspired the music were inexplicably omitted as well. None of these omissions served to enhance the listeners’ appreciation of the music, rather only put the audience at a disadvantage in every way, by distancing them from the composer’s expressive intent.

I have heard the work performed live before (with the composer’s widow Yvonne Loriod as solo pianist), mercifully without an accompanying film. The music is so rich and colorful and the composer’s commentary so striking that the performance lacked nothing, proving the music to be a powerful and fully-satisfying stimulus to the listener’s imagination. The idea that a video is needed to “sell” such a performance is an insult to the audience’s intelligence.

Even so, an _appropriate_ video could have enhanced the film, e.g. showing scenes from Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, starry skies, and the many particular species of birds whose songs Messiaen so carefully and lovingly transcribed (no, not not-singing scavengers in garbage dumps). The video that was presented, however, was beyond inappropriate: it _assassinated_ the musical experience.

On one hand, I wish to express my deep appreciation to UMS for bringing this extraordinary work to the Hill Auditorium stage. I know the piece well and was eagerly anticipating this performance.

Unfortunately, as skilled as the Hamburg Orchestra is, for me and countless others in the audience tonight, the performance was ruined by the utterly foolish “film” that was shown with it.

The more I watched, the more I became convinced that the filmmaker had bought into the preposterous theory being advanced by some that Messiaen was anti-semitic, and as an Israeli, this film was his act of revenge on Messiaen. He clearly strove to fight the music and everything the composer sought to express in it, to make the music seem ugly by combining it with incongruously ugly imagery. I can find no other explanation for such a travesty, other than perhaps sheer, oblivious stupidity.

The program booklet’s commentary on the music conspicuously omitted any reference to Messiaen’s own detailed, thoughtful and thought-provoking commentaries. All specific religious references disappeared, which I’ll assume was an attempt to appeal to predominantly non-religious current European audiences that the Hamburg orchestra plays to at home. Yet most all the composer’s references to the specific natural scenes that so vividly inspired the music were inexplicably omitted as well. None of these omissions served to enhance the listeners’ appreciation of the music, rather only put the audience at a disadvantage in every way, by distancing them from the composer’s expressive intent.

I have heard the work performed live before (with the composer’s widow Yvonne Loriod as solo pianist), mercifully without an accompanying film. The music is so rich and colorful and the composer’s commentary so striking that the performance lacked nothing, proving the music to be a powerful and fully-satisfying stimulus to the listener’s imagination. The idea that a video is needed to “sell” such a performance is an insult to the audience’s intelligence.

Even so, an _appropriate_ video could have enhanced the film, e.g. showing scenes from Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, starry skies, and the many particular species of birds whose songs Messiaen so carefully and lovingly transcribed (no, not not-singing scavengers in garbage dumps). The video that was presented, however, was beyond inappropriate: it _assassinated_ the musical experience.

Simply put, Messiaen’s work is incredible, and the Hamburg Symphony performed it exquisitely; however, the video was grotesque and irrelevant. I am not saying that the film is not art, nor that it was not well filmed, merely that it polluted the work of Messiaen.