Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season BSO_Overture_NOV_DEC | Page 10

Marin Alsop and the BSO take on one of the
20 th century’s most monumental symphonic works
I
by Devon Maloney
t’s difficult to put into words exactly
what it’s like to encounter Olivier
Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie
for the first time. It is an enigmatic
auditory experience quite unlike any
other that is challenging and even
perplexing at times, yet also extraordinary and
utterly gratifying in its mysterious beauty.
Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its
music director, Serge Koussevitsky, in the late 1940s, the large-
scale, 10-movement orchestral work by French composer Olivier
Messiaen requires an orchestra of over 100 musicians and about
one hour and 20 minutes of time to perform in its entirety. In
January, the BSO and Music Director Marin Alsop will give the
Orchestra’s premiere performance of Turangalîla during a weekend
of classical and Off the Cuff programs.
“As a BSO premiere, this will be the first time many of our
musicians have performed Turangalîla-symphonie, and it will
almost certainly be the first time many in our audience will hear
it,” says the BSO’s Director of Artistic Planning Ab Sengupta.
Olivier
Messiaen
8
OV E R T U R E / BSOmusic.org
“Messiaen’s music tends to be lengthy, and because of this, it
isn’t so much a part of the mainstream orchestral repertoire, so
it’s an especially exciting opportunity to hear this great piece.
Audiences will experience the full range of sounds an orchestra
can produce and really get a sense of what makes a symphony
orchestra a unique live music experience.”
“The piece is so ambitious in its scope, so over the top,”
says Alsop. “We wanted to give audiences a sort of maximum
orchestral experience. Messiaen was obsessed with the idea of
love when he composed the Turangalîla-symphonie, and he seems
to convey in this piece that the overwhelming joy of love that
humans are capable of experiencing is sacred and a means by
which we can approach the divine. That’s a message we wanted
to share with our audiences.”
Messiaen’s music is nothing if not heavenly in its ambitions. A
devout Catholic, he included elements of spirituality and religion
throughout his musical compositions.
“Messiaen was known for his phenomenal ear for sound, sonority
and harmony, and he incorporated in his music everything from
birdsong to Indian rhythms to Indonesian Gamelan music,” Alsop
explains. “He was a deeply spiritual figure and gave us a mystical
sense that engaging with the beauty around us —through nature,
through music —could elevate us from our worldly conditions.”
To achieve such a sublime sonic landscape, Messiaen drew on
a characteristically broad and extensive range of influences for
Turangalîla. The piece is the second in a group of three works
(Harawi and Cinq rechant being the other two) that are associated
with the legend of Tristan and Isolde, a story of love and death
perhaps made most famous by the Wagner opera.
Christopher Dingle and Robert Fallon expand on this in their
Messiaen Perspectives: “Messiaen’s declared view of his ‘trois Tristans’
as a group gives us authority to regard them as a kind of trilogy or
triptych.…Turangalîla is conceived and written on the largest scale,
and clearly embraces the widest sonic and expressive range.…”
And Tristan is only the beginning of the list of influences
Messiaen turned to for the symphony. “Turangalîla forms the
central and largest composition of a musical trilogy, setting the
Tristan and Isolde myth within Messiaen’s sound-world,” writes
Thomas Barker. “The word ‘Turangalîla’ is derived from a
combination of two Sanskrit words: Turanga meaning time…
and Lîla, meaning play in the divine sense of cosmic creation and
destruction, life and death.”

Turangalîla-symphonie