Les yeux clos
Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
Sanna Vaarni (piano)
rec. 2024, Järvenpää-talo, Järvenpää, Finland
Stradivarius STR37304 [68]

Tōru Takemitsu’s work bears the obvious influence of Olivier Messiaen’s distinct and colourful style, so pairing them together on a disc of solo piano music is a natural choice. However, having the disc alternate between the two composers throughout the album, as opposed to presenting the composer’s works separately, is not always convincing. 

We start with Takemitsu’s Les yeux clos, which was written in memory of Shuzo Takiguchi, a Japanese art critic and friend of Takemitsu. It is a beautiful, dreamy work with anguished undertones, well illustrating his debt to both Messiaen and Debussy in its alluring dissonances. Messiaen’s two Île de feu piecesfollow. They are darker and more austere works, inspired by Papua New Guinea, but they provide a nice contrast to the prior work. With Rain Tree Sketch,we are back in the watery, dreamy soundworld of Takemitsu before segueing into Messiaen’s Rondeau which, produced as a test piece and considerably less harmonically adventurous than much of his other work, ends up sounding a little out of place sandwiched between Rain Tree Sketch and For Away, another work of subtle, hazy beauty. 

The selections from Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus are superb pieces of music, but I prefer to hear them as part of a complete performance. Le baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus is especially enchanting here, but the mesmeric effect it can have when presented with the rest of the work is somewhat lost. Why these selections are separated by Takemitsu’s more straight-forward Litany, and what benefits that is supposed to afford, I am unsure. 

The final Rain Tree Sketch II was written in memory of Messiaen and here more than anywhere you can hear the technical similarities, though undoubtedly that was the intention. It is a dark, introspective work, palpably demonstrating the grief which Takemitsu must have felt upon the occasion of the older composer’s death which, he remarked, left a “crisis in contemporary music!”.

Sanna Vaarni plays sensitively and accurately, with great command of the idiom. The piano has a fairly bright tone which is excellent for clarity and some of the more percussive effects of the music but doesn’t find quite the tonal expression afforded by a softer midrange. Compare the opening of Le baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus here and then as played by Steven Osborne on his excellent Hyperion set: the difference is immediately noticeable, with the softer sound affording added intimacy and tenderness.  

Other than the aforementioned reservations about the tone of the piano, something that may by be partly due to the recording, too, the sound is crystal clear and perfectly detailed. The playing is very good and the music beautiful and provocative. My main issue is with the presentation of multiple smaller works and excerpts of larger works frequently alternating between the two composers. The effect, when listening to the album as a whole, is disengaging, and in the case of the excerpts from Vingt regards makes me wish we had a more complete selection, or at least could hear the excerpts all together and in the order they should be presented. 

Morgan Burroughs

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Contents
Tōru Takemitsu
Les yeux clos (1979)
Rain Tree Sketch (1982)
For Away (1973)
Litany (1989)
Rain Tree Sketch II(1992)
Olivier Messiaen
Île de feu I & II(1949-1950)
Rondeau (1943)
Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus XI, XII, XIII & XV (1944)