Word: martenot
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...multiple times over the past year to raves, but listening to the score out of context is a little like hearing gossip about people you don't know: some things simply don't register. Portions of the album, however, are breathtaking. The instruments--from synthesizers and the thereminesque Ondes Martenot to harps and an acrylic doodad of Albarn's co-invention that replicates the sound of car horns on busy Chinese roads--are lavish, but the exoticism is somehow kept in check. Typical of Albarn's various cultural adventures, he doesn't attempt to pass as a local; the details...
...besides working on a memoir, Bernstein is now finishing a string quartet and "toying" with a concerto for an Ondes Martenot, an electrically driven French keyboard instrument, and another for piano and orchestra that harks back to his early days as a concert pianist...
...have to know any of this to enjoy Turangalila. Written for large orchestra, including an eerie electronic instrument called the ondes martenot (memorably employed by Maurice Jarre in the score for Lawrence of Arabia), the symphony is like some fabulous beast howling in the collective unconscious of Western civilization. Heard live, it shakes, it roars and it rattles the fundament, compelling the listener to confront unspoken fears; even on compact disc, the force is still with it. And all courtesy of a mild- mannered French church-organ player who liked nothing better than to walk in the woods and listen...
...Gamier, Messiaen's work, to the composer's own libretto, is on the grandest scale. It lasts five hours and 40 minutes and requires a large chorus and 120-piece orchestra, including extra brass and winds, a large percussion battery and three electronic keyboard instruments called Ondes Martenot. The orchestra is so big that it overflows the pit to envelop both sides of the stage and several boxes. The subject is the spiritual transformation of Francis the man into Francis the saint. "I have chosen Francis," says Messiaen, "because he is the person who most resembles Christ: chaste...
...praying. "You speak with God through music," the angel sings, no doubt voicing Messiaen's own conception of his artistic role. "He will reply to you through music. Let the secrets, the secrets of glory open." As the angel begins to play a heavenly viol, an Ondes Martenot sounds a deceptively ingenuous melody. At once oddly angular but celestially serene, it floats above a soft C major chord in the strings and a wordless chorus. The moment is one of beatific bliss, a close approximation of what one imagines the music of the spheres to sound like...