Holy Terror

By Michael Walsh

COMPOSER: OLIVIER MESSIAEN

ALBUM: TURANGALILA-SYMPHONIE

LABEL: DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON

THE BOTTOM LINE: A powerful introduction to one of the century's giants.

In an era when artistic discourse has tended to be nasty, brutish and short- winded, Olivier Messiaen's musical grands projects stand apart from -- and largely above -- the works of his more prosaic mid-century contemporaries. Devoutly Catholic, the French composer was blessed with a pagan sense of muscular rhythm and luminous color. Highly intellectual, he was also irredeemably mystical, taking an almost childlike pleasure in the sounds of nature, especially bird song. He followed no "ism" and founded no school, but Messiaen, who died in April at 83, looms as one of the century's giants.

Ordinarily, the immediate postmortem period is the time when a composer's music and his reputation go underground with him. Not Messiaen's. Consider, for example, a new Deutsche Grammophon release of the sprawling Turangalila- Symphonie, in a stunning performance by conductor Myung-Whun Chung and the Bastille Opera Orchestra. Written in 1948, this vast, hermetic work is a powerful introduction to Messiaen's intricate, private world of symbol and allusion, both sacred and profane.

The Sanskrit title derives from two words: turanga, meaning flowing time, movement or rhythm; and lila, or love, sport, the play of the gods. The symphony's 10 movements, which last well over an hour, are rife with programmatic references to the ancient Celtic love story of Tristan and Iseult, to the myths of ancient India, even to the spooky stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

But you don't have to know any of this to enjoy Turangalila. Written for large orchestra, including an eerie electronic instrument called the ondes martenot (memorably employed by Maurice Jarre in the score for Lawrence of Arabia), the symphony is like some fabulous beast howling in the collective unconscious of Western civilization. Heard live, it shakes, it roars and it rattles the fundament, compelling the listener to confront unspoken fears; even on compact disc, the force is still with it. And all courtesy of a mild- mannered French church-organ player who liked nothing better than to walk in the woods and listen to the birds.

Hidden depths, to be sure. In his finest pieces, Messiaen came closer to articulating the profound horror and supernal beauty of his times than anyone else. The colossal Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, for wind and percussion (1964), may be the most explicit example of his penchant for the ineffable, but the composer's acute sensitivity to the human condition is found in more intimate pieces as well. Chief among these, and his most famous work, is the Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1941), for piano, clarinet, violin and cello, a moving confessional made all the more poignant by its having been written in a concentration camp. Forty years later, nearing the end of his life, Messiaen completed the masterpiece toward which his entire compositional life had been aiming: the opera St. Francois d'Assise, which will be staged anew this summer in Salzburg.

Turangalila, though, was his coming-out party, a stentorian announcement that postwar music need not be synonymous with Webernism. It's a holy terror, but a hell of a good time.