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Turangalîla Symphony, etc.

The ten movements of Olivier Messiaen's epic 'Turangalîla Symphony' run to around 80 minutes' duration in all, so it's never going to fit on to a single LP. Here it occupies three sides of vinyl, with a fourth devoted to 'November Steps', a piece by Tōru Takemitsu, apparently given its debut recording on this 1968 RCA release. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra were joined on the former piece by the composer's wife Yvonne Loriod at the piano with her sister Jeanne playing the ondes Martenots. On the latter, Kinshi Tsuruta played the biwa and Katsuya Yokoyama the shakuhachi. Seiji Ozawa conducted.

Extensive sleeve-notes written by Messiaen himself (translated by Louis Biancolli) explain the work's origins in an obsession with the story of Tristan and Isolde; its varied symbolism; its title (derived from two Sanskrit words); its overarching theme as being a "song of love, a hymn to joy" (of the mystical & transcendent sorts); its complex rhythmical qualities; and the grand scale of its instrumentation - with over a hundred musicians required to play it. He goes on to explain something about each of the work's constituent movements. There is, it's safe to say, a lot going on here. 

Its eccentric underpinnings notwithstanding, it is also entertaining and richly rewarding. One reaches the end with the sense of having been taken on a wild ride. All too seldom, however, do I seem to have eighty or so minutes of my undivided attention to devote to it: I can't have listened to it  more than a few times in the three years I've owned it. It's not like, say, a lengthier slice of minimalism, where one can readily wander out of the music & then step back into it without the sense of having lost one's place: there are interior narratives here that demand to be followed.

Regrettably, I've paid scant attention to 'November Steps'. I've listened to it only once thus far - unable to make much of it on that single acquaintance. As with Messiaen and his Symphony, Takemitsu contributes some explanatory notes, included within the gatefold, albeit of a more gnomic nature than the Frenchman's. Among these, the following: "Perhaps you have heard: the sound that a shakuhachi master hopes to achieve in performance, the consummate shakuhachi sound, is the sound the wind makes when it blows through a decaying bamboo grove" and "It has been demonstrated that dolphins communicate not with their gibbering voices but with the varied intervals of silence between the sounds they emit - a provocative discovery."

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