Olivier Messiaen/Toru Takemitsu: Turangalîla Symphonie/November Steps (RCA Victor)
Purchased at Jerry's Records from the Duquesne University collection
If you go back through this blog, you'll find a lot about Messiaen. I'm sure much of it is rambling and only moderately coherent. During the lockdown, I bought a 32-CD brick of Messiaen's music on DG. It's not everything he wrote that's in circulation, but almost certainly at least 90%. The works are organized by category, not chronologically; the solo piano works first, organ music after, followed by works for orchestra, then choral/orchestral compositions, dwindling down to miscellaneous. At times it was beautiful, and sometimes a slog. I couldn't quite maintain a one-disc-a-day pace.
It was interesting to take in a complete overview of his body of work. I came to a simple conclusion: the period from 1940-1950, Messiaen was unbeatable. There were a few pieces pre-1940 that stood out, but I largely found the (existing) early works to be unexceptional post-Debussy post-Romanticism. After the 1950s there are many great works, but nothing that stood out as having the inventiveness of his "golden period."
But that decade, still a young artist but matured artist, it's as if he could do no wrong. Quatour Pour la Fin du Temps, Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine, Harawi, and especially Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus and Turangalîla Symphonie. Just incredible.
A friend of mine likes making lists of things such as his 100 favorite composers, and posting comments on some of them. I'm not as inclined to codify such things, but I have decided that Turangalîla is my favorite symphonic work, probably by a wide margin. I haven't spent as much time listening to any other work for the symphony orchestra as much.
It's not enough for me to just say it's my favorite; the question is, why? What appeals to me about this work?
There is one thing I like about Messiaen in particular: even though he's working with a chromatic harmonic language, he's not afraid of a major triad and knows how to use it to great effect. Maybe more broadly, this is a work that both looks back on the past and forward into the future. It's unabashedly romantic at times (in the best possible sense) but also suggests the stormier atonality of the post-War generation to come.
I've seen Turangalîla performed twice in person, and had a similar experience both times. The work is ten movements long, and takes about 80 minutes to perform. After the first movement, I thought, wow, nine more to go? How long is this going to take? At the end of the piece, I thought, is that all? There isn't more?
How did that up-and-coming generation of composers hear this work? Did Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Xenakis, Berio have the chance to hear this composition in their early lives, and did it sound fresh to them or a harkening back to earlier times? Unless any of them wrote about the piece, I guess we'll never really know.
Even though I have at least two versions of this piece on CD, and even though I'm trying to be a little more selective about my vinyl purchasing, I still paid the $3 for this particular copy. Seiji Ozawa, that's a good sign, but especially the sisters Loriod on piano and Ondes Martenot made this worth the small cost. Yvonne (Olivier's wife) was known to come onstage and play her husband's music by memory. It's already staggeringly difficult music to play, let alone to so fully digest the work as to commit it to memory. I don't assume she plays it by memory here, being a recording session with her husband supervising the performance. I've recently noticed a recording by Yvonne of the notoriously difficult Barraque piano sonata (I wrote about a recording of that piece here a few posts back) and I think I need to listen to more of her apart from her performances of her husband's music.
I shouldn't ignore the fourth side, devoted to a single Takemitsu work. It was another reason this seemed like a good $3 deal. It's funny, I think I've made note before of Morton Feldman's observation of the modern 20-minute work. So many pieces he heard last 20 minutes. I don't think this can be coincidental with the rise of the long playing record album.
November Steps starts sounding like a kind of modernist orchestral work, a bit clustery but not so much on the severe side, but then opens up to passages of shakuhachi and biwa. The work alternates between lush orchestrations, and these emptier moments. Takemitsu was always a Japanese composer, I don't doubt that. It's more a question of whether how blatantly he draws on Japanese musical roots at any given time. I wrote previously about his In an Autumn Garden, set for Gagaku orchestra. Can't get much more Japanese than that.
Looking over his discography, I'm noticing he was involved with more soundtrack work than I realized. I was aware of Woman of the Dunes and Ran, but not much else. More things to investigate.
So okay, this was worth $3. And like pretty much every Duquesne LP I've bought, everything I want to get probably was barely played when in the university collection. My gain, even if I didn't need to take up that little bit of space for yet another double album.
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