 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 June 1999 Issue No. 435 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 June 1999 Issue No. 435
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Interview Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters The birds and I
By David Blake
Cairo Symphony Orchestra; conductor José-Maria Ulla; Turangalila Symphony, music Olivier Messiaen; soloists Roger Muraro (piano), Jeanne Loriod (ondes martenot); Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 19 June
What is it, Turangalila? Is it a part of a river, the Amazon freshly flowing before the pollution came? A mountain peak almost -- a legend of the magician Antenor who gave a celebrated party in his mansion, high in the Andes, to which all the glow people of the world came. At the climax of the revelry, all the guests turned into solid silver birds and could fly no more. They were Lucifer's children, selfish and cruel, and they sank into the earth, becoming shining silver dollars.
Turangalila opens in a sort of aerial hell. Messiaen's music then begins to formulate the legend of a dream which, since it is his music, is more than enough.
At the end of the season, before the summer calm settles over Cairo, it is more than a surprise that in one uninterrupted helping this Messiaen piece called a symphony arrived, like a floating armada. It moved through the spaces of the big Opera House in ten sections, each having different titles, all centering on love. There are other things -- the blood of the stars, song and sleep -- but always Turangalila returns as a melody, always the same, but always shocking.
The composer's idea for this work is enormous, its spacing is enveloping, and the scale, vast. Hell and Antenor's party have disappeared. The orchestra begins to toll like no bell ever did. It is Chime Time, prepare yourself for the trial.
The piano almost opens this symphony, and it never stops until it fluoresces at the end into sheer noise. In one of the opening sections, called Chant d'amour, the key note of the melody drops a fourth -- then down another fourth, and then slides into a blue note. This is one of Gershwin's habits. Done in this work, on this scale, the effect is sumptuous, beyond the abilities of most orchestras, but not of the Cairo Symphony on this night.
The only composer with the ability to use these huge tones is Anton Bruckner, whose religious faith was as true as Messiaen's, but while Bruckner's mansions are monolithic, Messiaen's are almost vegetable. Everything in this symphony seems aloft; in spite of the mighty weights, nothing is heavy. It is Days in the Trees, leaves and branches all swaying and floating lightly in the wind. These sounds are like taking the Concord to God. It is no use being queasy about Messiaen. He has God and he knows it, and he's eager that we should know it also. He is not like Wagner or Verdi who were masked about faith. He is as simple and direct as a child. His Saint François d'Assise is right beside Bach's Saint Matthew.
Turangalila was written in 1948. It is a strange tonal and spiritual phenomenon to come out of such a time. Schonberg's Moses was waiting to utter the words of the Zietgeist of the time, the piteous cry, "The word -- the word I lack", which ends the opera Moses and Aaron. This was the voice of the times, not faith, joy and light. Everyone was for the dark, shadows, fear, the awful load of guilt, drugs and despair which hung like a cloak over Europe -- part of its hereditary plague concessions.
And it was in this atmosphere Turangalila came about. All the pillars but one had fallen -- Messiaen's troubled but certain faith. A new affirmation was created in which Pierre Boulez and his music were beside Messiaen.
Things don't rest, music now faces a new threat -- the shape of the movement of the great mangeuse, the invisible octopus of sound, technology, sent to preserve but on the way to destruction. Real sound is quite as capable of disappearing as countries, currencies and races. There could be no proof of Bach or Turangalila at all. It therefore needs all the faith of this assertive pantomimic music to keep the sound ducts open.
Already Turangalila seems of another age. It is like an old fashioned piano concerto in the style of Tchaikovski or Rachmaninov. These works are devilish to play but run through only three movements. Turangalila is in ten movements, played without a stop. And the piano never ceases.
The demands on the pianist are almost beyond achievement, but not so with Roger Muraro, the French player who not only kept going, but as things got more dangerous, the better he played. He was astounding, and with the piano came the Birds. Messiaen, besides having God, has his birds. He adores them. Throughout his work birds go on, happy, chirping, singing and chattering, all from the piano. He has written about birds erotic, birds exotic and birds dominating. Muraro, the pianist, is almost a bird himself, tall, alert, swooping and witty. He sits on his technique, you are not supposed to notice it. He's not that sort of player, he's after the essence of birds and gives it to us.
Messiaen's Birds have nothing to do with Hitchcock's, which are demonic like the birds which blind Turnus in The Aeneid. Messiaen's birds are God's messengers. The Turangalila is so generous it's embarrassing. The composer's ear is as sharp as Picasso's eye. He uses everything, Oklahoma, Ellington and his great chocolate swoops into morbidezza. Sheer excess for its own sake in long, glistening layers of sound so rich it shocks, but with pleasure. Here at last, once again after the Baroque high tide, is the Major Key. It now seems to belong to Messiaen and God.
This work does not pall. The horrible exigencies of the jungle rat track are all bypassed. There are no black holes, only light explosions. The Cairo Symphony Orchestra caught Turangalila's message. What an orchestra. They are often stubborn and indifferent to pieces. At other times they become handmaidens of the art of music, and this was their greatest night, their night of the year. The big talk of millennium will have to go some to surpass their 19 June performance of the Messiaen. Conductor José-Maria Ulla was electric. He worked so well, so hard, so concentrated that at one of the movement changes he disappeared from the podium and turned up sitting on a step behind the piano, drinking water and mopping his sweaty brow. Jumping back into his place, the work expanded into a sort of tidal wave of gorgeous noise and came to an end.
He, the pianist, and the Cairo Symphony Orchestra had given us music's life's blood, a stain which even the great invisible mangeuse cannot wipe away, because it comes from God. Messiaen's work is life's blood itself, which he pours into his music.
