“I’m drawn to composers who themselves were spiritual,” the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Donald Runnicles told Limelight’s Clive Paget in a recent interview. As such, his return to the SSO saw the Scottish conductor, whose early musical experiences were in an Anglican church choir, pair music by two composers who share both staunch Catholic faith and long careers as church organists – Olivier Messiaen and Anton Bruckner.

Donald Runnicles. Photo © Robert Catto

Messiaen wrote Les Offrandes oubliées in his early 20s, and while it was his first published orchestral work, already we can hear in his music a sense of the timelessness that he would explore to such devastating effect in his Quatuor pour la fin du temps and something of the heaving ecstasy that would erupt so spectacularly in the Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is also an unequivocal expression of his faith, conveying in its three clearly defined sections: The Cross, The Sin, and The Eucharist.

Runnicles and the SSO conjured a profound stillness in the opening, even as the strings shifted over the uneasy haze of winds, while the biting percussion and writhing violins of The Sin...