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