Star rating ****
This might be seen as sacrilege, but, as much as I adore the music of Olivier Messiaen, the centenary of whose birth is being observed the world over, there is an unanswered question hanging over his last orchestral work, the colossal, 11-movement epic, Eclairs sur l'au-dela. Is it a grand valedictory and visionary masterpiece, or is it more a personal retrospective by the composer, casting a fond and farewell glance over his mighty and unassailable canon of work?

Even after the immensely authoritative and rivetingly- concentrated performance last night by the BBC SSO, with chief conductor Ilan Volkov, the question still hangs there.

The point is this. There is very little in the work, almost nothing, in fact, that is new, although you could argue that the essence of his music didn't change over his last five decades of writing. Across the 11-movement span, all Messiaen was there, from l'Ascension through Turangalila, Chronochromie, Et Expecto, the organ works, the birdsong works and much more. Stylistic fingerprints or self-borrowings? Hard to say. Eclairs, thus, remains for this listener a conundrum, though Volkov's blisteringly-focused and beautifully measured performance, allied to tremendous SSO playing, set its own context and made its own case.

What was beyond dispute, in a poorly attended concert, was the quality and character of Volkov's reading of Thomas Ades's Tevot, a large-scale piece whose gleaming, glittering surfaces give way eventually to a warm Romanticism that was movingly sustained in a wholly admirable SSO performance, superbly structured by Volkov to make absolute sense of the most complex pages in the piece. A good night for the SSO and its chief.
From yesterday's later editions.