Great news to begin a new year. A new partership between Harmonia mundi and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has been announced, and moving forward, harmonia mundi will be releasing the recordings of the prestigious Toronto Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Gustavo Gimeno. This new collaboration follows the recent appointment of Gimeno as the orchestra's Music Director. Gustavo Gimeno had this to say: "When I think of the greatest compositions of the 20th century, Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie is certainly among them. So when I was asked to select a work for my very first recording as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and to mark the organization's 100th year, my decision was immediate."

For a previous review of another recording of this work I used the following words as an introduction to it and I feel they bear repeating again. The music of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) has always, if anything, completely polarized admirers and detractors. And the Turangalîla-Symphonie, his most ambitious and somewhat incongruous orchestral work is a case in point. Its large scale and unusual scoring for large orchestra, piano, ondes martenot, glockenspiel, celeste, vibraphone and wood blocks, are only two of the points of contention. The ondes martenot, used within various works by Messiaen himself and other composers, is a strange electronic keyboard instrument invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot. A sort of antecedent to the Moog Synthesizer. Because it generates eerie and otherworldly sounds, it was used extensively as the instrument of choice for horror and science fiction movies during the 1950s, and was even recently used by rock musicians (Frank Zappa - Radiohead). Under lesser hands, this type of unconventional orchestration, Hindu symbolism and sprawling structure (ten movements) could appear gimmicky and might elicit derision from the audience, as it did after its première performance in Boston under the direction of Leonard Bernstein in 1949. But such is the musical genius of Olivier Messiaen, and the unique character of his style and distinctive sound, that the Turangalîla-Symphonie is now considered one of the masterpieces and important milestones of the 20th century.

Now mind you, for a composer like Messiaen, who was an extremely religious person and composed multiple works for the pipe organ with titles and subject matter deeply connected to religious subjects and the omnipresence of God, this piece may come across as if he was on a drug-induced trip, but after all it is about love, life and death on a cosmic scale. Regardless of which side of the Messiaen argument you stand on, there is an undeniably fathomless factor to this music that quite simply pulls you in. It's almost like a psychedelic, mind bending trip to the innermost depths of your soul and the outermost reaches of the universe and back. Take the sixth movement for example. Titled Jardin du sommeil d'amour, its calm, dreamy, drifting sonics pull you into a bizarre and surreal state of mind. Eleven straight minutes of sonic nirvana. I kid you not ... when listening to it the other day, one of my cats was sitting perfectly still on the floor, with a look in his eyes as if he could see beyond the walls. It was a disquieting experience to say the least.

This new riveting and spellbinding recording features the great Marc-André Hamelin on piano, and Nathalie Forget on the ondes martenot. Needless to say that the sound quality of the audio engineering is flawless, and reveals all of the finer intricate details of the orchestration from the slightest ping of the triangle, to the thunderous percussion whacks, to the wild slides and zany swings of the ondes martenot. Enjoy the trip!