Cleveland Orchestra Brings Messiaen to White Light Festival Cleveland Orchestra Franz Welser-Möst conducting at Avery Fisher Hall, as part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. Since white light results not from an absence of color but from the presence of all colors, it is altogether appropriate that Lincoln Center's White Light Festival should find a place for that supreme musical colorist Olivier Messiaen. And on Monday evening at Avery Fisher Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra, led by its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, performed Messiaen's "Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine" of 1944, a piece for a chorus of sopranos, piano and an orchestra fitted out with exotic instruments, alongside works by Beethoven. The three "little liturgies" are full of "harmonic colors," in Messiaen's own description quoted in Christopher H. Gibbs's program notes: "blues, reds, blues streaked with red, mauves and grays speckled with orange, blues riveted with green and encircled with gold, purple, hyacinths, violet and the gleam of precious stones: rubies, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts." Many of those same words appear in the texts, poems by Messiaen based on scripture, and they all come vividly to life in his kaleidoscopic scoring (though it would be hard to make one-to-one correspondences). The liturgies are meditations on God's presence (in us, in himself and in all things) and his ubiquitous love. Both words and music are bathed in ecstasy. The other big work on the program was more conventionally liturgical, Beethoven's Mass in C (1808). Though a grand and powerful creation alternating chorus with vocal soloists, it is less ambitious, less probing and less... well, ecstatic than his "Missa Solemnis" (1824). Filling out the program was Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" - the original finale of the Opus 133 String Quartet, which he discarded - in Mr. Welser-Möst's arrangement for string orchestra. This was a repeat of a performance the orchestra gave a year ago at Carnegie Hall and - beautifully performed, here as there - it again seemed to soften the edges of the movement's essential rawness and angularity, making spare textures plush (nine double basses!). The Mass, too, was superbly performed, not only by this great orchestra but also by the volunteer Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, obviously well trained by its director, Robert Porco. The work of the vocal soloists - Luba Orgonasova, soprano; Kelley O'Connor, mezzo-soprano; Herbert Lippert, tenor; and Ruben Drole, bass-baritone - was uneven, but Ms. O'Connor stood out for her deep, dark tone and vocal agility. Still, it was the Messiaen performance that will undoubtedly live longest in memory: an imaginative conception expertly realized. A vibrant scrim of sound - pinging celesta (played by Carolyn Gadiel Warner), virtuosically percussive piano (Joela Jones), eerily swooping ondes Martenot (an early electronic instrument, played by Cynthia Miller) and chiming vibraphone (Marc Damoulakis) - spanned the front of the stage, an effective foil to all manner of activity behind it. Peter Otto, the orchestra's first associate concertmaster, deftly led the choppy strings in the second liturgy with his hyperactive violin solo. And here again - in ethereal, highly colored harmonies, where finding and holding onto the right pitch can often be tricky - the chorus, a select group of some 20 women, was excellent. The White Light Festival continues through Nov. 23 at various New York locations; 212-721-6500, whitelightfestival.org.