Scott Cantrell

It's been Christmas this week at Southern Methodist University. Or so you might have thought, with, on two succeeding evenings, performances of Christmas keyboard suites by Olivier Messiaen. Both performances were connected to a symposium, co-sponsored by the university's Perkins School of Theology and Meadows School of the Arts, marking the late French composer's centenary.

Wednesday's offering was Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus (20 Gazes on the Infant Jesus), in a riveting performance by pianist Christopher Taylor. On Thursday, organist George Baker gave an authoritative account of La nativité du Seigneur (The Nativity of the Lord).

After the mind-boggling complexities of Vingt regards, La nativité, composed a decade earlier (in 1935), seems almost child's play. Its vignettes are more obviously pictorial, their appeal far more immediate.

The bird calls central to Messiaen's later music are just beginning to make themselves heard here. And while there are certainly quirky rhythms (notably in "The Angels" and the song-and-dance final section of "The Shepherds"), generally patterns are much more straightforward.

Still, these nine meditations, as Messiaen called them, have their share of striking gestures: the exotic, swaying procession of "The Magi;" the Incarnation twice imagined (in "The Word" and "God Among Us") as an almost violent intrusion; God's "Eternal Purposes" rendered as a free-floating solo over time-stands-still chords.

No composer of organ music has called for more specific and colorful combinations of stops than Messiaen. As rebuilt in 2000, by the Schudi Organ Co. and French voicer Jean-François Dupont, the organ in SMU's Perkins Chapel does approximate the sounds Messiaen had in mind. The chapel can't match the long reverberation of the Church of La Trinité in Paris, where Messiaen played for six decades, but it supplies a sympathetic "ring."

With rock-solid assurance, Dr. Baker captured all the music's drama, but also its tenderness and even playfulness. And he tossed off the final toccata of "God Among Us" with, as Messiaen would have wished, almost giddy virtuosity.