TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062992/06299937.000

Text File | 1992-09-24 | 4KB | 82 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 82

MUSIC

Holy Terror


By MICHAEL WALSH

    COMPOSER: Olivier Messiaen
    ALBUM: Turangalila-Symphonie
    LABEL: Deutsche Grammophon

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A powerful introduction to one of the
century's giants.


    In an era when artistic discourse has tended to be nasty,
brutish and short-winded, Olivier Messiaen's musical grands
projects stand apart from -- and largely above -- the works of
his more prosaic mid-century contemporaries. Devoutly Catholic,
the French composer was blessed with a pagan sense of muscular
rhythm and luminous color. Highly intellectual, he was also
irredeemably mystical, taking an almost childlike pleasure in
the sounds of nature, especially bird song. He followed no "ism"
and founded no school, but Messiaen, who died in April at 83,
looms as one of the century's giants.

    Ordinarily, the immediate postmortem period is the time
when a composer's music and his reputation go underground with
him. Not Messiaen's. Consider, for example, a new Deutsche
Grammophon release of the sprawling Turangalila-Symphonie, in
a stunning performance by conductor Myung-Whun Chung and the
Bastille Opera Orchestra. Written in 1948, this vast, hermetic
work is a powerful introduction to Messiaen's intricate, private
world of symbol and allusion, both sacred and profane.

    The Sanskrit title derives from two words: turanga,
meaning flowing time, movement or rhythm; and lila, or love,
sport, the play of the gods. The symphony's 10 movements, which
last well over an hour, are rife with programmatic references
to the ancient Celtic love story of Tristan and Iseult, to the
myths of ancient India, even to the spooky stories of Edgar
Allan Poe.

    But you don't have to know any of this to enjoy
Turangalila. Written for large orchestra, including an eerie
electronic instrument called the ondes martenot (memorably
employed by Maurice Jarre in the score for Lawrence of Arabia),
the symphony is like some fabulous beast howling in the
collective unconscious of Western civilization. Heard live, it
shakes, it roars and it rattles the fundament, compelling the
listener to confront unspoken fears; even on compact disc, the
force is still with it. And all courtesy of a mild-mannered
French church-organ player who liked nothing better than to walk
in the woods and listen to the birds.

    Hidden depths, to be sure. In his finest pieces, Messiaen
came closer to articulating the profound horror and supernal
beauty of his times than anyone else. The colossal Et Exspecto
Resurrectionem Mortuorum, for wind and percussion (1964), may
be the most explicit example of his penchant for the ineffable,
but the composer's acute sensitivity to the human condition is
found in more intimate pieces as well. Chief among these, and
his most famous work, is the Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps
(1941), for piano, clarinet, violin and cello, a moving
confessional made all the more poignant by its having been
written in a concentration camp. Forty years later, nearing the
end of his life, Messiaen completed the masterpiece toward which
his entire compositional life had been aiming: the opera St.
Francois d'Assise, which will be staged anew this summer in
Salzburg.

    Turangalila, though, was his coming-out party, a
stentorian announcement that postwar music need not be
synonymous with Webernism. It's a holy terror, but a hell of a
good time.