Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila-symphonie is not a work to be tackled lightly. It's a gargantuan piece -- 78 minutes, in today's performance -- for an enormous orchestra, and requires virtuoso soloists on the piano and the ondes martenot. (The what?, you may be asking. I'll get to that.) It's a work of passionate, almost crazed intensity, a wild attempt to depict the whole experience of human love, from the spiritual to the carnal.
And when it's done well, as it certainly was in this performance, it's an exhilirating thrill ride.
Messiaen calls for a very large orchestra, with triple winds and brass, a large percussion section, and an array of keyboard instruments -- celesta, glockenspiel (an odd little keyboard version that looked like a very small harpsichord), piano, and ondes martenot. The ondes is an electronic instrument that can be played from the keyboard to produce separate, distinct notes (but only one note at a time, no chords), or by sliding a ring along a metal rod at the front of the keyboard to produce swooping glissandos. It's got a 7-octave range with a less piercing tone than that of the theremin, and more timbral variation, created mostly through the use of multiple speakers, each of which filters the sound differently. Today's ondes soloist, Cynthia Millar, is the reigning queen of the instrument, and has performed the Turangalila more than 100 times; her fellow soloist, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, is also a long-time devotee of the work.
It's not a work that follows traditional symphonic structure. There is a sort of development section late in the work, but the music is largely built around the layering of contrasting ideas, rhythms, and timbres. The low brass blares a series of portentous chords; as they fade away, you start to hear the flurrying dance that the strings have been playing all along; and above it all, the piano chirps away in a variety of imitation birdsongs. (Birdsongs were one of Messiaen's obsessions; his business card described him as a "composer/ornithologist.")
The things that stick with me when I hear unfamiliar music for the first time tend to be unusual moments of orchestral color, and there are some lovely ones here. The piano frequently plays in unison with the celesta and glockenspiel, giving it a brighter, more tinkly sound; a solo clarinet becomes even more hollow and hooty when doubled by the ondes. Messiaen has a particularly interesting way of combining unpitched percussion with the piano. A single woodblock, for instance, will clatter out a rhythm as the piano plays a melody to match, with the two balanced in such a way that the timbre of the woodblock dominates; it creates the illusion that one woodblock is playing a full melodic phrase.
The final seconds of the work are striking. The orchestra builds and builds to a thrilling climax, and at the moment when you expect that last little bit of oomph to hit, that little exclamation point on the final instant, the music instead fades away in an instant. It's as if all that joy, that passion, that delirious ecstasy is just too much to be sustained; it can only implode. It's a magical effect.
This was the first concert I'd heard under Gustavo Dudamel, and he's great fun to watch. He's very lively on the podium, but his energy never detracts from the absolute clarity of his beat and his tempos (and in this work, tempos are changing all the time, both abruptly and through drawn-out ritardando passages). The orchestra clearly loves him, and it's exciting to think how good he could become if he's this good at 29.
This was a concert I won't forget for a long time, an absolutely spectacular afternoon, and the audience responded with a standing ovation that lasted for nearly ten minutes.
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