Messiaen's Turangalla Symphony -'a monstrously long and exacting work'

From the archive, 5 July 1953: The Observer’s Eric Blom finds Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony an ordeal, but applauds the BBC for broadcasting it

Chamber music and chamber-orchestral concerts in London are by no means unenterprising nowadays, but our large orchestras find it desperately difficult to hold their heads above water without courting wide popularity by stale and repetitive programmes. One must therefore highly commend the B.B.C.’s Third Programme for going to the fantastic extravagance of giving two performances of Olivier Messiaen’s “Turangalila-Symphonie,” a monstrously long and exacting work of which none of our organisations could possibly afford to give a concert-hall performance.

Now it is sure to have been said by those who sat through the protracted enormities of this work, and more particularly by those who could not find the patience or the fairness of mind to sit it through, that even as a broadcast it wasted an unconscionable amount of public money. But this is a pusillanimous attitude to take. It is true that “Turangalila” calls recklessly for an orchestra containing almost every current and every freak instrument, including vibraphone and ondes Martenot, to supply a stream of revoltingly shuddering and viscid sounds. The cost of all this, and of the rehearsals called for by appalling difficulties of technique and co-ordination might well have dismayed the B.B.C., so that whatever anyone may have thought of the work, one can only applaud the fact that such broadcasting experiments are made from time to time. For however limited the horizon of this or that listener, there is now a responsible adult community of radio patrons willing, and in many cases eager, to face any trial and to form independent judgments. Besides, someone or other is sure to have adored this symphony.

It would be far from the truth to say that I did, and when after five endless movements heard in the studio, I was told, innocently unprepared as I was, that there were another five to come, I began to realise to the full what the evening’s ordeal meant. Being well seasoned to that sort of thing, I could bear the harsh sounds that must have made many listeners in their homes turn off their sets precipitately; but the “beautiful” passages of a lushness never experienced before outside a cinema during the organ interlude, were not easily endurable. They reminded me of nothing so much as of the plant in Edward Lear’s botany which he calls “Nasticreechia Crawluppia.” But though the composer’s surcharged mysticism may be questionable, his sincerity is not, and in any case I persist in saying that this is the sort of thing we want from the B.B C. - among many other things, I add in anxious haste - and that so satisfactory a performance as that achieved under Walter Goehr is to be highly appreciated.

The Manchester Guardian’s Neville Cardus reviewed the Turangalîla Symphonyin April 1954.

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