Preview: Messiaen Festival: Oiseaux Exotiques/University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall

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“Listen to the birds,” composer Paul Dukas told his student Oliver Messiaen, who would become one of the most important and innovative composers of the twentieth century. Unlike Bela Bartok, who went around Transylvania a century ago with an early Edison cylinder machine that actually recorded peasants singing folk songs to make use of in his compositions, Messiaen never used a recorder, but only his ear and a pen to “transcribe” birds via musical notation in song around him. Messiaen became such an expert on the musical properties of various birds that he became globally renowned as an ornithologist. “Oiseaux exotiques” (“exotic birds”) features more than forty different bird calls and birdsongs for piano and small orchestra which will be performed by pianist Tamara Stefanovich with pianist and conductor Pierre-Laurent Aimard conducting this St. Paul Chamber Symphony Orchestra on a program which also includes Debussy’s “Petite” Suite and Aimard conducting the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto from the piano. A master Messiaen interpreter who worked closely with Messiaen, Aimard will be interviewed in a 6:15pm. pre-concert conversation. (Dennis Polkow)

October 3 at University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57^th, (773)702-8068. 7:30pm. $5-$35.