On a bitterly cold night in January 1941, French composer Olivier Messiaen debuted a new work. It was an unusual premiere. Messiaen’s audience was an assembly of war prisoners and their guards. The ...

When Olivier Messiaen died in 1992 at age 83, there was no doubt that he was a major figure of 20th century music, a great French composer and an important link between Ravel and Pierre Boulez. But ...

Olivier Messiaen’s ‘colossal saga’ enjoys a personal but unsentimental performance that ranges from ferocity to exquisite colour For what is unquestionably one of the great landmarks in 20th-century ...

The composer George Benjamin and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard met as students. In a new piece, they perform at the keyboard together. By Joshua Barone Loriod, the vessel for Olivier Messiaen’s ...

There is nothing else in serious music quite like Olivier Messiaen`s strange and wonderful ”Turangalila-symphonie.” If you choose to regard Wagner`s ”Tristan und Isolde” as the greatest love song ...

The life and work of the French composer Olivier Messiaen continue to fascinate. A mystic Catholic who sought inspiration from birdsong, vast empty canyons, stained-glass windows and his own ...

Berkeley photographer Deborah O’Grady has a picture in her studio of the French composer Olivier Messiaen, a Catholic mystic who transcribed bird songs and associated musical sounds with visual colors ...

Conductors, like most music lovers, keep discovering music that is new to them. My own latest discovery is the Turangalîla-Symphonie, a mind-blowing 75-minute orchestral piece by Olivier Messiaen, ...

Poet Michael Symmons Roberts gets to the heart of composer Olivier Messiaen's obsession with birdsong in this imaginative sonic trip through drama, music and poetry. Show more Poet Michael Symmons ...

My interest in Olivier Messiaen's music started in my teens, when I heard a couple of his Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus. I was intrigued, but by no means bowled over. Still, I liked it enough to ...

The great French composer Olivier Messiaen is like Wagner; you either love him or hate him. For pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, artistic director of the centenary survey of Messiaen's music that's ...