CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Discovery Concert: Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director and Conductor
Nicolas Hodges, Piano
Cynthia Millar, Ondes Martenot

MESSIAEN Turangalîla-symphonie

An engaging multimedia presentation, with enlightening discussion guided by Maestro Robertson and a full performance of Messiaen’s orchestral masterpiece, a transcendent tribute to love fusing the Sanskrit words turanga (“time”) and lîla (“play”).

Sound Insights

Sponsored by Ernst & Young LLP

Programs of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall are generously supported by the City of New York: Office of the Mayor, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Program Notes:

by PAUL SCHIAVO

Olivier Messiaen is widely recognized as one of the most important composers of the 20th century, the creator of a startlingly original body of music, and a profound influence on several generations of colleagues. Yet his work, more than that of any musician of comparable stature, stands outside the main currents of compositional development that shaped the music of his time. Embracing none of the modernist styles or movements (serialism, neoclassicism, etc.), Messiaen followed his own sensibilities throughout his career, forging a highly individual musical language based on bird calls, rhythms derived from an ancient Hindu treatise, synthetic scales of his own invention, numerical symbols, and a strongly felt affinity between sound and color. The result was a body of work striking in its originality.

Messiaen’s music expressed a visionary frame of mind consistently concerned with the stupendous, the miraculous, and the transcendent. The composer drew his inspiration from religious revelation, from the most vast and violent manifestations of nature, and from the songs of birds, whom he regarded as “the greatest musicians of the planet.” Even the most patently human experience—romantic love—was experienced by Messiaen in mystical and mythic terms. Great love, according to the composer, is “a love that is fatal, irresistible, and which, as a rule, leads to death; a love which, to some extent, invokes death, for it transcends the body—even the limits of the mind—and extends on a cosmic scale.” It is a love that Messiaen found expressed most vividly in the legend of Tristan and Isolde.

In the late 1940s, Messiaen wrote three compositions inspired by the notion of transcendent love as manifested in the Tristan myth. The most ambitious of these works, and one of the most remarkable of all the composer’s scores, is the huge Turangalîla-symphonie. The term “Turangalîla” is a composite of two sanskrit words and is rich in meanings. “Turanga” refers to time—or, more precisely, to the movement of time, “time that slips like sand through an hourglass or time that runs like a galloping horse,” in Messiaen’s poetic explanation. “Lîla” signifies love, life, movement, and the cosmic game of creation and destruction. Thus “Turangalîla” implies the temporal occurrence or rhythm of life, love, and death.

Messiaen called his work a symphony, but this designation must be understood in the most general sense of the term. Turangalîla Symphony offers no trace of the Classical four-part symphonic structure. Instead it unfolds in 10 movements, which fall into several categories. One group, encompassing the movements Chant d’amour 1 and 2, Jardin du sommeil d’amour, and Developpement de l’amour, is devoted to expressing or contemplating love. A second type, Turangalîla 1, 2, and 3, reflects an opposite yet complimentary force: death and destruction. The fifth and tenth movements comprise another class, these being ecstatic, scherzo-like movements that conclude each half of the composition. Finally, there is an introduction that sets the whole work in motion.

The internal details of the Turangalîla-symphonie are no more conventionally symphonic than are its broad formal outlines. Messiaen’s music offers little sense of the dynamic flow of ideas that traditionally characterizes symphonic composition. Rather, the composer uses contrast and juxtaposition as his primary method, moving abruptly between disparate themes or posing one large block of music against another. But if this work does not represent any familiar species of symphony, it does provide a summation of the compositional concepts Messiaen had developed during the first twenty years of his career. Although the bird songs and “color chords” that would become central to his later work assume here less prominent roles, a number of thematic figures clearly suggest a musical aviary, and Messiaen’s orchestration is colorful in the extreme. There is, moreover, a remarkable résumé of the composer’s novel ideas concerning melody, harmony, and rhythm.

This last element is especially important. Indeed, Messiaen referred to Turangalîla-symphonie as “a vast polyphony of rhythm.” As he explained in The Technique of My Musical Language, a treatise explaining his compositional methods, Messiaen thought of rhythm independently of pitch. Rhythmic figures had for him as much integrity and interest as melodic shapes, and over the years he developed a stock of favored rhythmic figures that include not only Classical Greek patterns and Hindu tâlas, but also such original conceits as rhythmic palindromes and figures whose durations yield prime numbers (11, 17, or 23 beats, for example), which Messiaen regarded as having quasi-magical significance.

To these and other rhythmic figures Messiaen applied various processes that were more important to his composing than traditional concepts of thematic development. They included augmentation and diminution, combining two or more short patterns to form a larger one, and the like. Such rhythmic inventions—both the stock patterns and the procedures for transforming them—are at work throughout Turangalîla-symphonie and account in large part for the flavor of the work.

Messiaen’s harmony is essentially inert. That is, it gives no sense of either tension or resolution, but creates a sound world that is beyond tension and resolution. It serves a coloristic rather than dynamic purpose, and although the composer did not identify specific visual hues in connection with the chords that appear in Turangalîla-symphonie as he did in some of his later scores, it is quite possible to hear many of the work’s harmonies as splashes of aural color.

Messiaen’s coloristic harmony is complemented by a style of orchestration for which the adjective “technicolor” is not too strong. For the most part, the composer treats the several sections of the orchestra—woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings—as distinct choirs, juxtaposing rather than blending their timbres in a way that might be compared to painting with primary colors. The percussion serves an especially important function, as one might expect in a work concerned greatly with rhythm, and glockenspiel, vibraphone, and celesta are sometimes used to resemble the music of Balinese gamelans, music that Messiaen first heard at a Paris exposition in 1931.

Two instruments enjoy special status. In most of his orchestral works, Messiaen featured the piano in a quasi-solo role, a practice greatly influenced by his close relationship—as teacher, collaborator and, after 1962, spouse—with the pianist Yvonne Loriod. (Loriod played in the premiere performance of Turangalîla Symphony and performed the work many times since.) Here the piano contributes virtuoso cadenzas, melodic phrases based on bird songs, and a rich array of chords, arpeggios, and other figures.

More exotic is the ondes martenot, an electronic instrument invented in 1928 by the French engineer Maurice Martenot. Played on a keyboard or with a slide mechanism that permits swooping glissando effects, its tone is high‑pitched and ethereal. It can penetrate the most thickly scored orchestral climaxes, raising the level of sonic frenzy to an altogether higher degree, or else croon sweetly in lyrical passages.

The ten movements of Turangalîla-symphonie contain no detailed programmatic references and offer no dramatic continuity. Instead, they present a series of highly unusual—one might even say surreal—aural meditations on love and death. The quality of those meditations is remarkable and wide-ranging. They include the juxtaposition of weighty, powerful, even violent music with passages of intense delicacy; movements that dance to rhythms reminiscent of Indian or Balinese ceremonies; an atmosphere of tropical languor, replete with slow, sweet, perfumed melody punctuated by bird songs; glittering piano solos; and the tremendous scherzo movements that mark each half of the composition. Messiaen called the first of those movements Joie du sang des étoiles. This title, which means “Joy of the Blood of the Stars,” suggests cosmic ecstasy, and that is what, in his unique style, the composer conveys here. The symphony ends with another ecstatic effusion, hardly less delirious than the earlier scherzo.

One cannot leave a discussion of Turangalîla-symphonie without some consideration of Messiaen’s aesthetics. This is not easy, for the composer’s music generally, and this work especially, defies nearly all accepted canons of musical propriety and good taste. Messiaen, to a degree quite unmatched in history, was unashamed of grandiloquence, lavish sonority, and the inflation of transparent musical ideas through reiteration and sheer volume. Harmonies that might sound embarrassing in a Hollywood film score troubled him not at all, and he allowed the ondes martenot to wail with abandon.

Yet these qualities cannot be dismissed as merely kitsch or naiveté. Messiaen used them too consistently and with too much conviction, forcing us to accept them as legitimate expressions of heightened emotion. Indeed, it is the immoderate quality of Turangalîla-symphonie—its extreme rapture and extreme lushness—which gives it authenticity.

Program note copyright © 2008 by Paul Schiavo

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director and Conductor
American conductor David Robertson is in his third season as Music Director of the 128-year-old Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, while continuing as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, a post to which he was appointed in 2005. In addition to his commitments with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Robertson continues to guest conduct nationally and internationally throughout the 2007–08 season. Highlights of the season included a residency just completed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic entitled Concrete Frequency, which showcased three separate programs and included the world premiere of a new work by Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison. Additional US engagements include performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera. International guest engagements include appearances with the Tonhalle Orchestra (Zürich), Swedish Radio Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

A recognized expert in 20th- and 21st-century music with extensive international conducting credits, Mr. Robertson has held several posts abroad. Prior to his Saint Louis Symphony and BBC Symphony Orchestra appointments, Mr. Robertson was the first artist ever to simultaneously hold the posts of Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon and Artistic Director of that city’s Auditorium, posts he held from 2000–04. From 1992 to 2000, he was Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, of which Pierre Boulez is Honorary President, and from 1985 to 87 he was resident conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Mr. Robertson was educated at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied French horn and composition before turning to orchestral conducting. He is the recipient of Columbia University’s 2006 Ditson Conductor’s Award, and he and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra received the ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming for the 2005–06 season from the League of American Orchestras. Musical America named him Conductor of the Year for 2000. In 1997, Mr. Robertson received the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award, the premier prize of its kind, given to exceptionally gifted American conductors. David Robertson has two teenage sons, and, with his wife, pianist Orli Shaham, twin boys born in September 2007.


Founded in 1880, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra is recognized internationally as an ensemble of the highest caliber, performing a broad musical repertoire with skill and spirit. In the 2007–2008 season, the Symphony continues to build upon its reputation for musical excellence while maintaining its commitment to local education and community activities.

In December 2003, the SLSO announced the appointment of its 12th, and second American-born, Music Director, David Robertson. He began his inaugural season in September 2005, joining the SLSO after an 18-month international search. Prior to his Saint Louis Symphony appointment Mr. Robertson was Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon and Artistic Director of that city’s auditorium.

The Symphony expanded its audience through frequent tours of the Midwest and the East and West Coasts in the 1980s and ’90s. Tours to Europe in 1985, 1993, and 1998, and to the Far East in 1986, 1990, and 1995, spread the reputation of the Orchestra throughout the world. Appearances at Carnegie Hall continue to garner critical acclaim. Recordings by the Symphony have been honored with six Grammy Awards and 56 Grammy nominations.

The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra was founded on the belief that great music should be available to everyone. Through a series of innovative and nationally recognized community-oriented activities, including many education and outreach programs, the musicians of the Symphony have shared their love for music with millions and introduced classical music to those who otherwise might not have been exposed to it. Each year, Symphony musicians participate in more than 300 free performances and events throughout the greater St. Louis area.

As part of this effort, the Symphony participates in the E. Desmond Lee Fine Arts Education Collaborative, a partnership between the Symphony, the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Young Audiences of Saint Louis, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and more than 90 schools in 12 area school districts. Based on a 1996 pilot program that was originally funded by the Whitaker Foundation, the Collaborative enhances the music curricula of member schools through various initiatives, including classroom interaction with musicians, faculty, and artists from the participating institutions.

Nicolas Hodges, Piano
Nicolas Hodges was born in London in 1970. One of the most exciting performers of his generation, he is equally active in several fields: 19th-century, early-20th-century, and contemporary music. His substantial repertoire of works written prior to 1900 include compositions by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms, while his 20th-century repertoire includes works by Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Busoni. In the field of contemporary music he plays both the classics of the avant garde as well as works from the latter decades of the 20th century. He has close working relationships with many composers including John Adams, Harrison Birtwistle, Elliott Carter, and Oliver Knussen, and he has had works written for him by Georges Aperghis, Michael Finnissy, Beat Furrer, Brice Pauset, Rolf Riehm, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Charles Wuorinen. Several composers are currently writing works for him.

Elliott Carter’s concerto Dialogues was written for Mr. Hodges and was premiered with the London Sinfonietta and Oliver Knussen in 2004. This was followed by a recording of the work for Bridge Records, and Mr. Hodges has subsequently given premieres with the Chicago Symphony and Daniel Barenboim, MET Chamber Ensemble and James Levine, Asko Schoenberg Ensemble, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Tokyo Sinfonietta, and Remix Ensemble.

His career has taken him around the world to major festivals and concert halls in the UK and Europe, Japan (Suntory Hall), and the US, including Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York and Orchestra Hall in Chicago. His concerto engagements have included performances with the BBC Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic, Stockholm Philharmonic, and the Tokyo Philharmonic, and under conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Jonathan Nott, Pascal Rophé, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Leonard Slatkin, Tadaaki Otaka, and Hans Zender.

Mr. Hodges’s future plans include concerts with the WDR and SWR Symphony orchestras, Lucerne Symphony, and Remix Orchestra Porto. He gives recitals in Berlin, Huddersfield, Salzburg, and for IRCAM in Paris.

Nicolas Hodges is currently Professor of Piano at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart.

Cynthia Millar, Ondes Martenot
Cynthia Millar studied the ondes martenot with John Morton in England and with Jeanne Loriod, whose brother-in-law, Olivier Messiaen, did so much to bring the instrument to a wider public. Since Ms. Millar first performed the Turangalîla-symphonie at the BBC Promenade Concerts in London with Mark Elder and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, she has performed the work all over the world with such prominent conductors as Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Andrew Davis, André Previn, Edo de Waart, Leonard Slatkin, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Kent Nagano, and Franz Welser-Möst. She has also performed in the premieres of Turangalîla in Scotland, Singapore, and Washington, DC, and in 1996, she played in the first performances of the work in Los Angeles for more than 20 years with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ms. Millar’s other repertoire includes Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, which she has performed with David Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Libor Pešek and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra at the BBC Proms, and with David Zinman at the Aspen Music Festival and School; and Varèse’s Equatorial with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Her work as a performer in more than 100 film and television scores, for composers such as Maurice Jarre, Henry Mancini, and Miklós Rózsa, was Cynthia Millar’s introduction to the world of film music. She played the world premiere of Elmer Bernstein’s Ondine at the Cinema in a special concert to celebrate the composer’s 80th birthday with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London. She has also written a number of film scores herself, including the music for Arthur Penn’s The Portrait, starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall; Martha Coolidge’s Three Wishes; and Peter Yates’s The Run of the Country. For television she composed the music for a major documentary series, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, for BBC/WNET.