The composer Olivier Messiaen famously introduced blackbirds and nightingales into his music. It is both baffling and ...

A poet who explores and questions faith finds inspiration and provocation in the music of Olivier Messiaen, a composer who made ancient faith sing in the secular world “Je suis né croyant.” ...

It brought us Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony, a vast, 10-movement work for an orchestra so large that there almost wasn’t room for the augmented, percussion-laden forces even in the ...

Jamaica's former poet laureate, Lorna Goodison on Dante's Inferno, Michael Symmons Roberts on French composer Olivier Messiaen, and Daniel Swift on Shakespeare's first theatre Jamaica's former ...

Meet Olivier Messiaen – the bird-mad composer who used birdsong to create some of the most startlingly original music of all time. It all started in springtime... in a prisoner of war camp ...

Probably the only classical composer to have a mountain named after him (Mount Messiaen, Utah, 1978), Messiaen is among the most strikingly individual of 20th-century composers. Probably the only ...

C ountless composers have incorporated birdsong into their music, from Beethoven to Ottorino Respighi to — most famously — Olivier Messiaen. But the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara went ...

This recording was made in Messiaen's presence and was authorized by him, so we must take it to be 'authentic'. The rhythmic precision throughout is certainly very commendable tempos are well chosen ...