SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Messiaen, Turangalîla: Pierre-Laurent Aimard, (piano), Cynthia Millar (ondes martenot), Philharmonia Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor), Royal Festival Hall, London, 7. 2. 2008 (AO)


Turangalîla defies pigeonholes. It’s a vast panorama taking in Peruvian music, gamelan, The Rite of Spring, Tristan und Isolde, Gershwin, Gurrelieder, The Lyric Symphony and all manner of pseudo-orientalism. This is a symphony which, almost literally “contains the world”. Written at the height of the Cold War, after years of austerity, it must have seemed even more colourful and exuberant than it does today. Yet it’s that very panoramic excess that alienates its critics. An early writer referred to its “fundamental emptiness… appalling melodic tawdriness…..a tune for Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, a dance for Hindu hillbillies”. He has a point. If ever there was music in Technicolor, this is it, complete with cinematic swirls of the ondes martenot.

Perhaps Turangalîla needs to be appreciated in the context of its time, for the Hollywoodesque extravaganza seems impossibly innocent now. These days, when we hear the ondes martenot, we don’t associate it with cutting edge Varèse, but with Béla Lugosi. They don’t even make movies like that anymore.

Yet this performance showed that there’s more to Turangalîla. Instead of milking the psychedelic effects, Esa-Pekka Salonen emphasised its vigorous energy. Beneath the gaudy flamboyance, there’s a deeper intelligence in operation. Messiaen’s all-encompassing vision came from a love of all things in nature. The exoticism isn’t there for decoration, but stems from a much more profound belief that all things reflect God’s bounty. It is a celebration of life, of love, and of creation in all its glory.

This performance moved, both in terms of pace and interpretative commitment. Salonen intuits the fundamental  life affirming energy the music generates. Getting an orchestra of this size to move as a single organism takes some doing, but Salonen’s style cuts with diamond hard precision. No chance here of the orchestra getting bogged down in surface details. Salonen goes straight for the jugular, without waffle or empty gesture. This was clear, lucid conducting, so taut and muscular that it forcefully made a case for Turangalîla as a symphony totally relevant for our times. His long years in Los Angeles may have helped Salonen appreciate that basic values can exist beneath the glitter.

French composers and writers had long been fascinated by non western culture. Consider the novels of Pierre Loti, for example, or Ravel’s Chansons madecasses, or the wonderful songs of Maurice Delage, which Messiaen may have heard in the 1930’s. They aren’t pastiche and make no pretence of being authentic. Messiaen uses Peruvian and gamelan colours to extend his sound vocabulary not as an end in itself. Turangalîla is a kind of symphony in the sense that Messiaen develops several main themes throughout. The Fifth movement Joie du sang des étoiles is much loved because it’s easy to follow the basic cells developing. This performance however, also demonstrated how Messiaen had absorbed more subtle aspects of Balinese music, where progression comes from incremental changes in tempo, volume and direction, rather than formal rules of structure. It worked well because the huge numbers of players operated in unison, like a gigantic chamber ensemble. Wonderful, assertive yet balanced playing from all.

Also interesting was the way Salonen built up the big, angular blocks of sound. Many instruments play at the same time, but don’t blend, as such. Instead the shapes come from precise stops and starts, clearly focussed decelerations and accelerations. Turangalîla is a kind of kind of Rite of Spring, where textures are clearer and multi-faceted. It’s interesting to compare how both pieces build up their “barbaric” blocks of sound.

Interesting, too, was the way Salonen enabled the group of keyboards to be heard clearly over the tumult of brass and percussion. Aimard’s glorious cadenzas take pride of place, but the piano part relates clearly to the ondes martenot. They repeat each others figures, as if in conversation. Aimard, for example, swoops right across the keyboard in an evocation of the way the slide on the ondes martenot creates a wildly oscillatiing glissando. Turangalîla was also a celebration of Messiaen’s love for Yvonne Loriod, so an awareness of the musical relationship btween them is essential. The two instruments are reinforced by two glockenspiels, one played on keys, the other with mallets. The celeste was positioned between them. It was a telling detail, at once as important to interpretation as to sound relationships.

If the rest of this excellent Festival maintains the high standards set by this performance, as the good choice of performers would indicate, it will present Messiaen as a truly visionary composer – despite the oddball infelicities in Turangalîla.

Anne Ozorio


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