A Special Edition Album Booklet to accompany the Harawi album available at Hyperion and elsewhere: https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_1EMCDA
MessiaenÕs music is full of colour and full of joy and of life, and full of joie de vivreÑjoy in living itself. His music is also full of extreme passions and contrasts, and some of the colours he creates in his harmony are strange to the point of sounding otherworldly, as if from another civilization É beyond the stars. But he warmly invites the listener (and the performer) to hear the world as he hears and sees itÑin the 'songs of love and death' of Harawi that means loquacious and audacious birds, forbidding stone statues and ritual dances, and the tenderest affairs of the heart, all in chords and melodies that cross from wartime Paris with its underground jazz ('the symbol of, or the last tie with, the outside free world') to a Peru of folksong and legend where monkeys jabber, dancers shake their ankle bracelets, and syllables of the Andean Quetchua language are de- and re-constructed.
Harawi takes its title from a type of Peruvian folksong most often lamenting the death of the beloved. MessiaenÕs Harawi is a song cycle of a dozen songs, some short and sweet, others long and intense, telling the story of two lovers fated to love, to die, and to be reunited in their love and death, and transcending the limitations of present reality. A surrealist painting by Roland Penrose, Seeing is believing, is, as Messiaen put it himself, 'the symbol of the whole of Harawi'Ñ'Two male hands reaching out, then a womanÕs head upside down, her hair spreading out upwards from below, her brow, her eyes, her face, her neck, and then the rest of the woman is missing, or rather, she is continued in the sky and the stars' (the central part of the painting is featured on this album cover).