Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Messiaen’s “Turangalila Symphony”

Tonight at 7:00 on the Evening Concert on WILL-FM 90.9 it’s the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Jean-Yves Thibaudet is the soloist in Ravel’s “Piano Concerto in G Minor”.  Esa-Pekka Salonen guest conducts. Also on the program Messiaen’s “Turangalila Symphonie .

Tuesday March 1: Chicago Symphony Orchestra (16-09) 

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Turangalîla

Debussy: Syrinx (Samuel Coles, flute)  

Ravel: Piano Concerto in G Minor (Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano)

*Messiaen: Turangalîla-symphonie (Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano; unnamed Ondes Martinot player)   

Anna Clyne (b. 1980, Britain): <<rewind<< (2005, rev. 2006)

*"It’s a piano concerto. No, it’s a percussion concerto. No, it’s the mother of all symphonies! — longer, at close to 80 minutes, than Beethoven’s Ninth, and with 10 movements to boot, instead of a measly four.

Or maybe it’s an ondes Martenot concerto…?

“Turangalîla-Symphonie” by French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) isn’t like anything else in the 20th-century symphonic repertoire. Huge, ecstatic, complex, beautiful, it is, in the composer’s words, both a “love song” and a “hymn to joy.”

It was composed in 1946-1948 and premiered by Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1949." (Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times)