An SLSO fan wrote in after the Turangalila performance at the Touhill in January, marveling at how she found herself singing some of the melodies after she left the hall. She didn’t think Messiaen would ever have that kind of effect.
But last night, after David Robertson’s discussion of the work, with slides and musical excerpts, I heard many people in Carnegie Hall whistling and humming and singing Messiaen. Those are some pretty wonderful melodies to have stuck in your head, much better than, say, when you get a Hall & Oates song in there and can’t get it out (and I like Hall & Oates).
SLSO Chorus director Amy Kaiser was in the box next to me (I got a box at Carnegie; this blog is taking me places). She’s back in her hometown to visit her father, age 102 – I met him at a concert at Powell when he was a mere 100 – and to hear the Orchestra. “I like the concert dress,” she told me. Our orchestra dressed in basic black (the men looking dashing in their open collared shirts) for the more informal Discovery Concert Series at Carnegie. “They look like a very hip bunch.”
David gave an introduction to the ondes Martenot at the start of his talk, which included a reference to Matt Groening, who is a Turangalila fan, having named a character in Futurama, “Turanga Leela.” David has teenage sons. He’s up on his Matt Groening references.
When Cynthia Millar gave a few demonstrations of the ondes, from my seat above I could see a large section of the audience give a collective expression of “That’s cool.”
To better convey Messiaen’s use of rhythm and color, or rhythm as color, David selected paintings by Sonia and Robert Delaunay, in which color and line achieve a visual rhythm on the picture plane. With the orchestra playing excerpts, the images projected on the back wall of the stage, it all came together, with a greater understanding of Messiaen’s synesthesia. Messiaen actually heard color, and David shared an anecdote of talking with the great composer when David was in his mid-20s. With a projection of the stained glass of Sainte-Chappelle on the wall, David said he asked Messiaen what he heard when he saw those windows: “A symphony of color.”
At intermission, with people whistling Turangalila melodies, I headed to the bar and, there he was, holding forth with some friends, Alex Ross. The author of The Rest Is Noise, in bookstores everywhere, the whowouldhavethunkit bestseller on music in the 20th century, right there, saying, oh, I am sure the most witty and smart and perceptive things. I had one of my Wayne and Garth moments – you know, when in Wayne’s World Alice Cooper asks them to come along and party and they kneel down and cry “We’re not worthy. We’re not worthy.”
By the way, Ross named the SLSO as a weekend highlight in New York. See here: www.therestisnoise.com.
Also seen at the concert: Manny Ax; new SLSO executive director and president Fred Bronstein; St. Louis Post-Dispatch music critic Sarah Bryan Miller; and flutist Jennifer Nitchman's mom, who is a big slso/blog fan.
The concert: I have had few experiences in which the sheer excitement of an orchestral performance was so palpable. When David gave the audience “permission” to applaud at the end of one of the most thrilling movements, it was as if he’d popped the cork of a celebratory bottle of champagne. You could feel the audience erupt with a sense of relief – the joy that had been building could be released at last.
And joy was the theme of the evening, in many ways. Messiaen is one of the few artists who has managed to express joy, happiness, ecstasy – the non-brooding subjects – and to do it with such intelligence and craft and taste.
And David Robertson radiated joy on the podium. I had a good view of him from my seat, and he anticipated every moment of beauty with a wide, happy grin. He was supremely confident, and he knew the orchestra was playing Turangalila with the generosity and skill and understanding that only the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra could bring to it. It’s a wonderful quality in this ensemble of musicians – their ability, even in a massive work such as this, to draw the audience in, to bring the audience closer. They achieve an intimacy that is rarely found in the concert hall.
And last night, they knocked Turangalila out of the cosmic ballpark.
