Creative complex: Don’t let its supposed difficulty put you off Messiaen’s high modernism

The French composer's name may have become a byword for the challenging sounds of modernism but don’t let that stop you from experiencing his fascinating creations.

Hannu Lintu, the artistic director of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, has overseen a new recording of Messiaen’s Turangalîla. KaapoKamu
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You could call Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] many things, but bland isn't one of them. During its 75 minutes, this epic piece runs through imitated birdsong, clockwork rhythms, jagged, ear-challenging music and what sound vaguely like the ghosts of Broadway show tunes.

It has nods to Wagner and Strauss, and an intense seriousness, but all the way through it also has electronic wibble-wibble noises from an early electronic keyboard that sound like they've escaped from a 1950s B-movie. Challenging? Possibly. Mad? Not at all. First performed in 1949, the French composer's masterwork is an example of how truly groundbreaking, innovative work can still sound exciting at 65 years old. Now. Turangalîla has been given another recorded outing, courtesy of a new release by the not widely known but very good Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FRSO). Even attempting such a large-scale complex piece deserves some applause, but the Finns have done a brilliant job of doing justice to Turangalîla's many shifts and moods.

There's no escaping one thing, however. For many listeners, even fans of much classical music, modernist scores like Turangalîla seem too oddball and spiky to be consumed in anything but small, occasional doses. Certainly, while the piece isn't consistently atonal, it doesn't have much in the way of consistent tunes (though neither does Wagner, and that's never held back his popularity). Personally, I think this is a real pity. Not, I should add, because I'm an ivory-tower pseud that believes everyone should be force feeding their kids Stockhausen for breakfast, but for another reason. When it's taken outside the confines of high culture, the public is actually quite open to all sorts of music and art that would have been perplexing or even unsettling to our grandparents' ­generation.

Modernist music may continue to be damned as arcane when it's played in the concert hall, but out in popular culture at large its influence is widely felt, even taken for granted. Excerpts from Messiaen's masterpiece could happily fit into the soundtrack of a 1960s sci-fi film or television series, largely because such music often betrays its influence. But no one listens to the (admittedly more tame and less interesting) incidental music in, say, Star Trek and dismisses it as only for the world's beard-scratchers. Likewise, in contemporary electronic music, most people would agree that micro-genres like minimal techno aren't likely to suit everyone's taste. Few would claim, nonetheless, that you need a special set of skills, a particular educational background or an inherently intellectual bent to enjoy it. Outside the classical sphere, the enjoyment or rejection of music that swerves away from the obviously tuneful or predictable is seen (rightly) as a matter of taste.

Maybe we could extend this attitude more widely to groundbreakers such as Messiaen? The composer certainly had the sort of eclectic tastes, creative boldness and tragedy-touched life that could have helped make him a star — had he not been a quiet, self-effacing man who looked rather like a friendly owl.

Born to a teacher/translator father and poet mother in 1908, Messiaen (pronounced, roughly, Messy-ON) was a precocious man who had synaesthesia, the tendency to see particular colours when he heard certain musical chords. He was a committed Roman Catholic, whose love of the organ might have marked him out a musical path as a backward-looking traditionalist. Instead, he developed a passion for Javanese gamelan and Indian classical music, an interest in early electrical instruments and, later, a fascination with recording and transposing birdsong. Match all this with his synaesthetic tendency to see notes in terms of colour (he believed the music of Chopin, Wagner and Stravinsky to be especially “colourful”) and you have the roots of Messiaen’s style. If there’s at least one run-of-the-mill criticism of modernist art that his exuberant and complex creations can be spared, it’s the old chestnut that they could have been created by somebody’s 6-year-old.

This exuberance is not only joyous or playful, however, and neither was Messiaen’s life. In 1937, the composer effectively lost his first wife, the composer Claire Delbos, when severe brain damage during an operation left her institutionalised for the rest of her life. Likewise, Messiaen’s work as a medical auxiliary in the French army saw him interned in Germany by the Nazis in 1940, where he nonetheless composed some stunning music. Despite an unwavering spirituality, this is also music that visits some dark places.

The Turangalîla-Symphonie is Messiaen's real masterpiece. Titled with a compound of the Sanskrit words "turanga" (meaning the speed of a galloping horse) and "lîla" (meaning play), the piece is apparently inspired by the doomed but transcendental love story of Tristan and Isolde, explored so brilliantly by Wagner. But while the inspiration comes from a well-thumbed part of the western canon, the direction is new.

Just listening to the opening bars of the FRSO's new recording of the piece, we're prompted to realise that, like the Wizard of Oz's Dorothy awakening in a strange, beautiful new world, we're not in Kansas any­more. The piece starts with martial, booming brass that has an echo of the strident nature poetry of Richard Strauss. But while Strauss's music might suggest, say, first light in the Alps, Messiaen's opening suggests something less earthly, a sunrise on Mars perhaps.

As soon as he has created this impression, the composer moves on to mouse-like scurries down the piano keyboard — deftly, delicately played by the pianist Angela Hewitt – accompanied (subtly, it's true) by what sounds like a toy whistle that's escaped from The Benny Hill Show.

If this sounds discordant or silly, it isn’t. It’s just the sound of a novel, beautiful mind at work. Just when you think you’re safe, this mind throws something else into the mix, such as a move from a slow, creeping tempo into the delicate tick-tock rhythm of a clock mechanism. Messiaen’s most famous leap out of the box, however, is in using an early electronic instrument called the ones Martenot. Invented in 1928, this small electric keyboard no doubt sounded like something from a space-age future in Messiaen’s day. Now its quavering sound — it slides from note to note rather than hitting each note dead on — has an eerie but charming retro quality. It makes you think back to some 1950s television programme boldly proclaiming that, some day in the future, we’ll all have our own portable telephones that will be so tiny they’ll actually fit in a medium-sized ­briefcase.

It would be wrong to suggest that Turangalîla's sound is all wolf-whistles, military brass and wobbly sounds from the future, however. Some of it is more than a little tuneful — almost catchy. The new recording excels, for example, in one particularly jaunty section entitled Joy of the Blood of Stars. Given a whirling fairground feel by the orchestra, this sounds like a children's nursery rhyme recalled in unquiet sleep. Later, the conductor Hannu Lintu skilfully brings out the delicacy of a slow, shimmering interlude called Garden of Love's Sleep. This has snaking lines of soft strings, flute and glockenspiel, and a chirruping piano that recalls the sensuousness of Debussy.

While the dream sleep painted here has enough edge to suggest that its reverie is not entirely tranquil, there’s real charm and grace at work, too. This side of Messiaen’s music may still sound like a lullaby from the Planet Vulcan to some, but its heady elegance and its depth of real feeling still deserves to be better known.

Feargus O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to The National.