Prom 38: Messiaen – Turangalîla Symphony 13.08.15

[teamsaint]

I think I understand why you say "in your face". Some of the more percussive sections were enthusiastically dispatched and, as expected, the performance had an undeniable, insuppressible 'joie de vivre'. However, the pianissimos were utterly astounding and I've never heard that level of subtle detail at the previous performances that I have attended, nor from any recording. And believe me, my and Bryn's faces were very close to it all (Caliban was on a sofa, I believe, to our right)!

To be fair, I think that one would have to have been there to fully appreciate what I mean. It was essentially a very subtle performance. Somehow there was a divine blend of ebullient music, exuberant musicianship and the diaphanous quality of the programmatic dimension of the work. In fact, I think it was perfect!

well I'll just have to listen again !! Tough work, but somebody has to do it.
Glad you had such a great time.

[doversoul1]

Oh! Wow!! (I’ve just listened to it) This could have been composed with the Proms in mind. Who needs Ibiza prom?

[Vile Consort]

As soon as it finished I went to the Bridgewater Hall web site in the hope that they were doing it in Manchester - and they are! So ... seat in the front row of the circle.

I rather fear, however, that a previous hearing of this work in the same hall under M Tortelier was the start of my tinnitus!

[Bryn]

Just taken a couple of hours editing the HD Sound offering of last night's Turangalîla-Symphonie to lose some of the inter-movement commotion. On playing it back now, I note how different the balance appears from what I heard from the Arena. Most striking so far has been the clarity of the deep bass of the ondes Martenot. Noting the generally fast tempi I am reminded of negative comments re. the Chailly recording when it was first released. I forget which prominent reviewer it was, but the specious claim was the Chailly's tempi were much faster than any previous performances. That reviewer had clearly not encountered the early 1950s recordings of performances under the batons of the likes of Rosbaud and Désormmière c. 69 and 65 minute respectively. Mena, c. 71 minutes (after trimming some of the inter-movement hiatus), by comparison was actually quite relaxed, though much quicker than Chailly (c. 77 minutes). Rattle's and Previn's studio recordings, at over 80 minutes each, now seem a tad pedestrian.

[edashtav]

Thanks for that contextual overview, Bryn.

[EdgeleyRob]

Tried to listen on I player.
Had to give up as it was making me feel quite anxious to the point of feeling unwell.
This happens,albeit very rarely,with a few pieces but never before with Turangalila.
The last time it was Carmina Burana IIRC.
It's all very strange.
Anyone else sometimes have an extreme adverse reaction to music ?

Foulds: Three Mantras was brilliant btw

[Petrushka]

I recorded this to listen to as a slightly deferred relay and will end up keeping it! There are times in Turangalila when my attention can wander a touch but there was none of that here. The rhythmic impetus was all and the piano and ondes were perfectly balanced, the latter in particular making a wonderful noise. No punches pulled in this performance that's for sure; in your face in the best possible way. Gripping from first note to last.

Oh and was this the quietest and most attentive audience of the season so far? It certainly sounded like it to me.

[Bryn]

... Oh and was this the quietest and most attentive audience of the season so far? It certainly sounded like it to me.

The fair weather Prommers stayed away. There was plenty of room in the Arena and a good many empty seats, too.

[Serial_Apologist]

Anyone else sometimes have an extreme adverse reaction to music ?

I once went berserk at a heavy metal gig - had to be carted out! I always think of that film scene where US aircraft attack the Viet-Cong blasting The Ride of the Valkyries down at them through loudspeakers to terrorize them, and the power of music has always struck me as potentially lethal in wrong hands. Being a universe in a grain of sand type of person I've never liked music that drowns the senses by sheer volume engulfment, especially at the turn of a volume knob, which is as easy as turning up the current to extract information under torture. I can think of several pieces that have had the effect you describe on me, but would go more for anything loud enough to precipitate my tinnitus, or anything by the electronics duo zoviet*france, remembering listening to them on radio with the saxophonist Evan Parker (whom I know) with my father, and both of us nearly freaking out at the same time and having to switch it off fast when he said it was doing his head in. These psycho-physical effects seem to have become more pronounced since my heart attack of two years ago, cutting out whole areas of my previous listening.

[richardfinegold]

Tried to listen on I player.
Had to give up as it was making me feel quite anxious to the point of feeling unwell.
This happens,albeit very rarely,with a few pieces but never before with Turangalila.
The last time it was Carmina Burana IIRC.
It's all very strange.
Anyone else sometimes have an extreme adverse reaction to music ?

Foulds: Three Mantras was brilliant btw

Most Wagner has that effect on me

[jayne lee wilson]

Tried to listen on I player.
Had to give up as it was making me feel quite anxious to the point of feeling unwell.
This happens,albeit very rarely,with a few pieces but never before with Turangalila.
The last time it was Carmina Burana IIRC.
It's all very strange.
Anyone else sometimes have an extreme adverse reaction to music ?

Foulds: Three Mantras was brilliant btw

Yes... as I've recounted here before, I had to leave the hall during a Mahler 6, here in Liverpool with Gerard Schwarz a few years ago. By the start of the finale, I felt sick and dizzy, with a piercing headache, and my heart was racing. I'd been unable to withdraw from an intense involvement with every note of the piece, but the andante, placed third, gave me little respite - that doomed yearning for something beyond was too much. So the intro to the finale felt overpoweringly dark and foreboding - in a terrible, personal way far beyond the music itself....

I left the hall and sat, gloomily, in the bar. The next day I regretted terribly not having witnessed the finale, the hammer blows, the vast waves of sound, the intensity of experience - I loved it the more deeply. Finally I faced the piece again, some seven years later in 2010, with Petrenko. I could scarcely make it to my seat, I was so faint, so nervous. But I got through it, oh yes. I rode with each wave of the finale's power, at one with the sweep of each peak, each flooding trough, at one with the rhythm of my heart, my breathing...

The piece is probably over for me now. But

Never mind
Never mind
I live the life
I left behind

(Leonard Cohen)

[kernelbogey]

Jayne and Rob's responses prompt a useful way into reporting on my only visit to the Hall so far this year; I was in the stalls L (about 4 o'clock, treating the arena as a clock face with podium at 12 noon). It was an attentive and respectful audience, with no attempts made to clap betweeen movements - though excited yells at the end of each piece, and long applause at the end of the concert.

What struck me most about the whole concert was the huge dynamic range of the orchestral sound, when sitting at its level and about 20 metres I suppose from the conductor. I've never heard the Foulds before (barely heard of him, indeed) and have only heard Turangalila at home on hifi equipment; and mostly on my own recording of the previously mentioned YOGB performance. I can best describe the difference as emotionally shattering.

Haviing read sceptically in the programme note by Malcolm Hayes of 'some of the most barbaric and elemental music Foulds ever composed' in the third movement, I surprised myself by finding that movement the most terrifying music I've ever heard.

But memory of it was erased by the Turangalila performance. The orchestra must have consisted of more than 150 players. I counted and recounted the percussion section (some of whom had to dash around their battery of instruments) and I think they numbered eleven. (I smiled at two moments in the last or penultimate movements when five of them stood, each vigorously shaking a pair of maracas!) The contrast between ppp passages and fff was huge compared with what one experiences on (most) hifi equipment. I'm fairly familiar with the piece from (my) recording and did not detect any great eccentricities in Mena's view of the work - he as animated as could be, dancing to the music on the podium, leaning forward, crouching, stick wielded with vigour.

Although some of my reaction is contextual - some tough stuff to deal with in recent days - I found the phrases ringing in my ears for the rest of my journey home to the bowels of rural Hampshire. The somewhat coy references in the programme notes by Malcolm Hayes to the so-called 'statue' theme (on trombones, at the very beginning) and 'flower' theme (Messiaen's words) as 'musical imagery [that] is straightforwardly sexual' clears up for me the mystery of these euphemisms, and reminded me of the erect penis images to be seen all over Bhutan; so I impute a Tantra philosphy to the work. Hayes' concluding remarks speak of 'a development section and reprise [that] lead to a final radiant statement of the 'love' theme, and a tumultous [verb. sap.] conclusion [to the work]' which makes much more sense of the interplay of themes throughout the work.

[Bryn]

Thanks for that contextual overview, Bryn.

Turns out the Désormière is available on YouTube, though in a different transfer from the CD, it would appear. While the INA CD transfer runs to around 65 minutes, that on Youtube, from the same broadcast (via telephone lines from Aix-en-Provence to Paris) runs closer to 70 minutes.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The entire broadcast of the Desomiere performance (including radio introductions, commentaries, interval (the performance was split into two parts with an interval - including a discussion of the work with amongst others, Darius Milhaud), and applause is available as an MP3 download:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B012T64FJE?keywords=turangalila&qid=1439625827&ref_=sr_1_16&s=dmusic&sr=1-16

(the timings for the tracks suggest a total performance time of 68mins 39secs).

[gurnemanz]

Turangalîla was one of my first ever classical concerts in April 1969. Charles Groves/BBC SO at RFH with John Ogdon and Yvonne Loriod. I have a good CD recording with Previn/LSO but somewhat surprisingly in view of the huge impact of that first encounter, I have not actually seen it live again since then.