I first heard the music of Olivier Messiaen when I was a student in the 1980s, recently arrived in London to study Theology and Philosophy at Heythrop College. I loved classical music but knew nothing of music written in my lifetime.
One evening I happened to be walking past the Festival Hall when an elderly man got out of a limousine and went into the concert hall. There seemed to be a lot of excitement in the audience.
I was a poor student, but tickets were cheap enough for me to be able to walk in and see what all the fuss was about. The music started, and to this day I don’t know what the piece was, but it was like nothing I had ever heard. Words like “radiant”, and “ecstatic” point in the right direction, but it’s hard to capture what I felt.
