Olivier Messiaen

condition (records/box): NM / NM

Insert included.

The summit of Olivier Messiaen's orchestral achievement, and among the most jubilant and unclassifiable works in the entire European repertoire. Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and premiered under Leonard Bernstein in 1949, the Turangalîla-Symphonie is a work in ten movements, scored for large orchestra with piano obbligato and the electronic sound of the ondes Martenot — a combination that places it simultaneously within the tradition of the nineteenth-century symphony and in a sonic universe that owes more to the Carnatic music Messiaen was studying, to the ragas and rhythm cycles of India, to his own mystical theology of divine love, than to anything Brahms or Mahler could have imagined.

The title is Sanskrit — turanga, the movement of time in all its modes; lîla, the act of divine creation, the play of life and death. The work is nothing less than a monument to joy: cascading ondes textures, monumental brass chorales, violent rhythmic ostinati, and at its heart the slow movements in which Messiaen's "chord of resonance" opens into something that has no analogue in Western music. This EMI pressing — the preferred quadraphonic edition, issued in Germany in a gatefold 2LP box — is the document to have. A necessary cornerstone of any collection.