Concert Review: Listening to Ecstasy

The Cleveland Orchestra plays Messiaen.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Ecstasy: Franz Welser-Möst (on podium, back to camera), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (left) and Cynthia Millar (right)
and the Cleveland Orchestra play the Turangalîla-symphonie.
Photo by Roger Mastroianni © 2018 The Cleveland Orchestra.

The music of Olivier Messiaen has never been an "easy sell" to the average concert-goer. Performances of his works remain infrequent, partially because of his own status as an outlier among the creative minds of the 20th century and partially because of the massive demands these pieces place on both performers and audience. It is a state of unfortunate neglect, one that the Cleveland Orchestra corrected on Wednesday night with a performance of Turangalîla-symphonie, the huge ten-movement piece commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1949.