Centenary Gala: Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony
Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Joanna MacGregor
Piano: Joseph Havlat
Ondes martenot: Cynthia Millar
Brighton Dome
13 April 2025
You have to hand it to BPO. This gargantuan work doesn’t get out much because the enormous forces it requires make it prohibitively expensive to stage. What better way, then, for BPO to make a grand celebratory statement than to perform the ten movement, 80 minute Turangalila Symphony as the gala final of its centenary year?
All credit to BPO’s music director Joanna MacGregor who programmed it and originally intended to play the piano part. Instead she conducted it in place of Sian Edwards and brought in the excellent Joseph Havlat as solo pianist. Versatile flexibility is the name of the game.
This would have been a good concert to take a musically inclined child to so that he or she could see, hear and identify a spectacular range of unusual instruments. Nine percussionists is quite something in a piece which is effectively a massive scale concerto for piano and ondes. I had to Google the latter before the concert started: it’s an early electronic instrument played on keyboards whose sound comes from passing a loop over wires. In the hands of ondist, Cynthia Millar it makes an ethereal, haunting sound especially when whistling descending glissandi are set against Messiaen’s jazzy rhythms and col legno strings in the second movement and evocatively topping the love song melody in the fourth movement.
Other high spots in this performance included the five percussionists with their own rhythmic melody in the seventh movement plus a beautiful cello solo and the grandiloquent passion, of which MacGregor is clearly not afraid, in the filmic eighth movement. And at the very end we got the most sensational, triumphant sustained final chord I’ve heard in a very long time. And a word of praise for the wood block player who is kept busy through most of this work and does a fine job.
Well played as it was, Messiaen is pretty impenetrable and not everyone’s cup of tea. Although there were evidently many cognecenti in the audience, the hall was not full and a surprising number of people slipped out quietly long before the piece was over. The woman in front of me was knitting – yes knitting! – which I’ve never seen before at a classical music concert.
A bold and brave choice then, and atmospherically appropriate for the occasion but BPO must always be careful not to alienate its existing audience members in its quest for new ones. It’s not an easy balance to get right and I shall be interested to see the programmes for the 2025/6, 101st season which we are promised will be announced soon.
