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Sorted for Eternity London Barbican 01/17/1999 - Olivier Messaien Cinq rechants, Turangalîla
Symphony Yvonne Loriot (piano), Jeanne Loriot (ondes martenot)
BBC Singers
Stephen Cleobury (conductor)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Davis (conductor) This year the Barbican's weekend in celebration of a twentieth-century
composer was dedicated to Messaien. The final concert consisted of the
second and third parts of his Tristan trilogy which was composed in
the years following the war, with the shorter third part, Cinq
rechants, first. The first part, Halawi, a song cycle for
soprano and piano, was performed in the afternoon.
The trilogy expresses and glorifies the idea of a love which, Messaien
said, in a sense invites death because it "transcends -- even the limits of
the mind -- and extends on a cosmic scale". This is a love for the whole of
creation, including famously the birds, and it is also romantic love,
including Messaien's love with Yvonne Loriot. They met and fell in love in
1942, but were unable to marry until after the death of Messaien's first
wife in 1959. There are only a few explicit allusions to the traditional
story of Tristan and Isolde (in the words of Cinq rechants, alluding
to the troubador tradition which is one source of the story). But the
three-part structure with its tension between time and rhythm on one hand
and the eternally returning themes on the other evokes Wagner's work
indirectly.
Cinq rechants is a set of five verse-and-refrain setting for twelve
unaccompanied voices. The settings of mythological-lyrical fragments,
Peruvian folk lyrics and pure syllabic sounds, are cumulative, piling up
tones, textures and texts, and more discordant than similar developments in
the more familiar Turangalîla. The BBC Singers under Stephen
Cleobury gave a performance which was perhaps even more abrasive than the
music demanded. But it was good to hear Turangalîla in the
context of the completed trilogy, which ends with a steady resolution of
the musical layers into a single line, "dans l'avenir", in the future.
Ending the concert and the weekend with Turangalîla was
justified not just by its length and popularity, but also by the sublime
exuberance of this performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew
Davis. It was incredibly moving to see and hear Yvonne Loriot's joyful
participation in a work which celebrates her love. She and her sister
Jeanne Loriot are perhaps more grand'mère than grandes dames in
appearance. But when they play -- Yvonne outgoing and sweeping on the
piano, Jeanne introspective on the ethereal ondes martenot -- their
authority is overwhelming.
Turangalîla can be made to sound like orientalizing nonsense,
but not tonight. The audience in the sold-out Barbican Hall was ecstatic. H.E. Elsom
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