As part of the Southbank Centre’s ‘Multitudes’ festival, pairing music with works in other art forms, this concert brought together Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-symphonie with a new film animation by 1927 Studios. One would have thought that Messiaen’s ten-movement orchestral extravaganza, celebrating cosmic, transcendent love contained multitudes of sound and instrumental texture enough. But in our days of social media and sensory overload, it seems not (and it wasn’t even possible to enjoy a quiet drink in the Southbank’s entrance hall before the concert either, as a medley of popular extracts were blared out over the speakers). It seems all the more strange to pair this work, premiered in 1949 during the era of ‘glorious technicolour’ sound films with a new animation that’s inspired by the expressionistic aesthetic of black and white silent movies of the 1920s.
As Messiaen’s piece is influenced by the legendary story of Tristan and Isolde – but is not a descriptive or narrative retelling of it, as though a massive symphony poem – the film outlined that fable as a neo-mediaeval fantasy. Insofar as its dramatic twists and turns, and overlaid colours on some montages suited the course of the music, it was an ingenious interpretation of the score’s structure. But, in imposing a straightforward narrative of Tristan and Isolde’s illicit but passionate love, betrayed to the King by the Knave, on the sequence of movements which allude to somewhat different ideas and concepts as far as we can tell from Messiaen’s titles for them, that rather circumscribed the impact of his visionary music and detracted from it. Even more so did the tiresome frames of text in twee, banal olde Englysshe, to a evoke a faux mediaeval setting. If Messiaen had wanted to make this a more overtly literary music drama or scenario he would surely have made it so, as he did on a smaller scale in the near contemporary vocal or choral compositions Harawi and the Cinq Rechants. An interesting parallel in reverse arises with Fritz Lang’s genuinely masterly silent film double Die Nibelungen (1924). Much as it must have been tempting to use Wagner’s music, instead an entirely new score was composed by Gottfried Huppertz, creating an apt sonic atmosphere, but not dominating the film.
In their own terms, some of this animation’s more abstract visual sequences were effective and striking, presumably taking their cue from Messiaen’s notion of the ‘Garden of Love’s Sleep’, with Tristan and Isolde’s erotic ecstasy realised as a psychedelic orgy of plants and vegetation springing into life, blending surrealism with the ethos of the Flower Power movement. That eventually overtakes the King’s austere court at the narrative’s end, after the lovers’ deaths at their own hands by the poison which the monk-like ‘Alchymist’ had given Isolde alongside the love potion, and they have been transformed into butterfly-like fairies. These full-colour sequences teemed as much as the music – arguably too much so, with shimmering images as though under rippling water, and glimmering light making for an assault on the sense alongside the score, which is no mere soundtrack but demands full attention by itself. Certainly the film imparts the same spirit of irrepressible, elemental joy as the music. But however well aligned with the latter, it tended to demonstrate that it’s a fool’s errand to try and pin down Messiaen’s remarkable creative imagination to specific ideas, just as the irate King cannot capture those fairies after the lovers’ deaths in this animation.
Evidently conscious of the musical work being juxtaposed with the film, if not entirely relegated to it, Vasily Petrenko conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance that had a fluid, dynamic flexibility, generally moving briskly as though to keep up with the images on screen – a little over 70 minutes in length compared with the 75 to 80 minutes’ duration of most recordings. That maintained dramatic cogency, but there tended to be a slight veil over the music which sometimes effaced more vivid contrasts between timbres and instrumental groups, though I’m prepared to admit that closer attention to the music may well have been drawn away to the visual dimension of this project.
The long slow movement of the lovers’ sleep was one of the swiftest that I can recall hearing, making it not so much a static, mystical dream as a lyrical, rolling song of love, though chaste with its lean sonorities here. On the whole that was a refreshing transformation, which also ensured that Steven Osbourne’s piano arabesques told an exquisite little drama in itself, in duet with the orchestra, rather than serving as incidental, disconnected decoration as they sometimes sound. But the movement’s relentless course caused it to lack repose, which would have provided much needed contrast. Elsewhere, Osbourne’s contributions, as also Cécile Lartigau’s on the ondes Martenot, sensitively came to the fore and dissolved back into the music in delightful ebb and flow. The lithe energy instilled by Petrenko brought an emphatic if not ecstatic conclusion.
