Brighton Philharmonic/MacGregor review – compelling Messiaen played with panache

The Guardian

14-04-2025

The Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra marked its centenary with a performance of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony under their principal conductor Joanna MacGregor – only the fourth music director in the orchestra's 100-year history. MacGregor herself is a familiar interpreter of the obbligato piano part, which here was played by her former pupil, Australian pianist-composer Joseph Havlat, while MacGregor conducted the symphony with considerable fire and brilliance. Cynthia Millar, meanwhile, was the ondes martenot soloist.
Completed in 1948, and inspired by Messiaen's fascination with various versions of the legend of Tristan and Iseult, Turangalîla is essentially an examination of sexual and spiritual love, in which consuming desire can be seen at once as affording access to the divine and bringing in its wake the potential for suffering or destruction. Though a devout Catholic, Messiaen was no prude, and music of deep sensuality and carnality gives way throughout to ecstatic dances of cosmic jubilation and moments of incipient menace.
MacGregor and the BPO captured the work's emotional immediacy, hypnotic force and sense of almost tangible physicality to compelling effect. Textures gleamed and glistened, rhythms were crisp, precise, superbly articulated. Joie du Sang des Étoiles, taken fractionally faster than we sometimes hear it, sounded thrilling in its elation and drive. Jardin du Sommeil d'Amour, the work's effective slow movement, was all drowsy sensuousness, the strings silky; the piano solo, suggestive of birdsong, exquisitely done by Havlat, whose playing combined shimmering elegance with intensity throughout.
Millar matched his rapt introversion here. Just occasionally, however, the balance between them came adrift elsewhere, and the ondes martenot's moans and whoops sounded fractionally too distant. The work's brief moments of darkness were chillingly realised, though, particularly the seventh (itself entitled Turangalîla 2) of the work's 10 movements, where brass, ondes and piano are brought into stark opposition. Turangalîla is, of course, very much a showpiece for a virtuoso orchestra, and the Brighton Philharmonic – its members drawn from the principal players of London's orchestras together with young musicians – played with terrific panache and commitment. Heady stuff, beautifully done.