The LNSO’s new winter season revolves around the Pinnacle of the 20th Century Classics.
We will hear one such pinnacle in the season opening concert: Turangalîla, a 1948 symphony by the French mystic Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992). In this splendid large-scale piece, the composer studies, with passion and fire, the swift passage of time, and confers dazzling, transcendental joy upon us, as if in a song of stately love. Famous French pianist Roger Muraro – possibly the most brilliant interpreter of the symphony – will participate in the performance. The score is marked by an exotic streak, written for one of the first electronic music instruments, the ondes Martenot, emitting a peculiar ululating sound.
The concert will open with a piece by Olivier Messiaen’s student, the outstanding composer Tālivaldis Ķeniņš (1919–2008) who spent his life in Canada. Beatae voces tenebrae (Beautiful Voices of the Past), one of his most beautiful works, is the composer’s reminiscence of his friends, and the heart of these memories is BACH – an immortal series of letters, the sequence of sounds encoded into Johann Sebastian Bach’s surname: B-flat-A-C-B.
The LNSO music director Andris Poga will conduct the concert, and he has long cherished the dream of performing Turangalîla.