Karajan Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker

From the canyons of America up to the stars: when the New York art patron Alice Tully commissioned a new work from Olivier Messiaen to commemorate the bicentenary of the United States, she probably suspected she was unlikely to receive a hymn to the USA. Instead, the committed Catholic composed “Des Canyons aux étoiles…” in order to “glorify God for all he has created,” with all “the beauties of the earth (its rocks and birdsong) and the beauties of the physical and spiritual heavens.” Messiaen drew inspiration from the country’s spectacular landscape, travelling to Cedar Breaks and to Bryce Canyon, “the greatest wonder of Utah,” a “bowl of red, orange and violet-coloured rocks: palaces, rectangular and fat-bellied towers, natural windows, bridges, statues, pillars, whole cities and now and again a deep, black hole.” With this evening-length work, whose tone colours contain “all the colours of the rainbow” and in the words of the composer, whose synaesthesia was well-known, “revolved around the blue of the Steller’s Jay [an American songbird] and the red of Bryce Canyon,” Sir Simon Rattle and the young musicians of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Karajan Academy will close this year’s Musikfest Berlin. Stefan Dohr, the Philharmoniker’s solo horn player, takes on the delicate “Appel interstellaire”, with which the horn opens Part Two of the work. Kirill Gerstein will be seated at the “bird piano,” which, Messiaen explains, is also an “orchestra piano.”