BBC Music is celebrating all that is French in the current issue of its Music magazine with articles and a CD focussed on composers influenced by the French Catholic Revival.
As they note, this month marks the centenary of the birth of France’s greatest 20th-century composer, Olivier Messiaen. His exotic music took orchestral colours to new heights, following on from the impressionistic world of Debussy and Ravel. Also in this French issue is their Composer of the Month, Francis Poulenc, the self-confessed ‘half-yob, half-monk’. And Poulenc features on their free cover disc too, in a performance of Gloria, his reverent but often witty masterpiece.
The French Catholic Revival was an exceptionally fertile period in the recent history of the Church with the development of the Modern Catholic Novel and the achievements of French Catholic artists in Post-Impressionism, the Nabis, Symbolism and Fauvism, alongside the music of Messiaen, Poulenc and others together with the philosophy and support for the Arts of Jacques Maritain. The whole period deserves a fuller description and exploration than has yet been published in order to highlight lessons for our own engagement with culture and the Arts.
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Olivier Messiaen - L'Ascension.
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