A Korean in Paris

It's like a scene from Victor Hugo. After the visionary French composer Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, at the age of 83, his wife was rummaging through papers in his desk, where she found the draft of his farewell cornposit ion, a full-length work which the master had written in secret. It was dedicated to Myung-Whun Chung, the young director of the Opera Bastille in Paris. The work, called Concerto for Four, will be premiered in Paris in September. "We were absolutely flabbergasted," the 41-year-old Korean maestro says. "It was sort of a present Messiaen left us." This month Deutsche Gramrnophon will release the orchestra's newest disc, Messiaen's massive Eclairs sur FAu-Dcld..., which debuted in New York seven months after his death. The work's title might be translated as "Illuminations from the Beyond": perhaps Messiaen meant the title as a heralding of the concerto he was then secretly composing? Chung, laughing, says, "No, I think he just wanted to surprise us. I think he wrote it in secret so that if I ever asked him when he was going to write that piece for us he could pull out the manuscript and say, "Here it is!'"

JAMIE JAMES