I'm currently listening to Olivier Messiaen's Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité. It's a late Messiaen work - and inaccessible even by Messiaen's cloudy standards. Yet there's something so simple about the way the dense chords give way to a solo by the blackbird or yellowhammer on the organ pipes. I'm not enough of a musician to be able to understand Messiaen's music properly but this one really speaks to me. It's deeply spiritual music.
I'm listening to a recording from St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. I did actually have a recording of the piece before, but only a cassette that I ripped from a CD recording by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, one of the country's top organists whose wife Deirdre used to teach me recorder when I was very small (20+ years ago). I wonder how Deirdre is these days?
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