VFO / ESA-PEKKA SALONEN
A spectacular program opens this 33rd edition with the monumental Turangalîla-Symphony composed by Messiaen and premiered by Leonard Bernstein in 1949. A true symphony concertante, featuring Lucas Debargue on piano and Cécile Lartigau on the Ondes Martenot, it will be conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, arguably the greatest living conductor for 20th-century music, making his long-awaited return to Verbier this summer.
The first part of the concert features the grand finale of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, performed by the American mezzo-soprano Michele de Young.
Programme
RICHARD WAGNER (1813–1883)
Final Scene from Götterdämmerung
Interval
OLIVIER MESSIAEN (1908-1992)
Turangalîla-Symphonie
Artist(s)
- Verbier Festival Orchestra
- Esa-Pekka Salonen direction
- Michelle DeYoung mezzo-soprano
- Cécile Lartigau ondes Martenot
- Lucas Debargue piano
Lucas Debargue plays Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue at the 2024
Both Messiaen and Wagner summoned huge orchestras and unprecedented instruments (ondes Martenot for the former, Wagner Tuba for the latter) to express the human soul in its most intimate recesses. The Turangalîla-Symphony, whose title comes straight from Sanskrit and conjures up ideas of love, joy, life and death, is the central part of a triptych devoted to Tristan and Isolde. A way of connecting the most distant feelings and liturgies in an immense orchestral bonfire, whose musical development would be the presence of numerous percussion instruments, including the celesta and vibraphone, and above all the ondes martenot, in dialogue with a virtuoso piano on the frontiers of the unknown, magnificently embodied by Lucas Debargue.
Beforehand, the immense Michelle de Young will have performed the grand finale of Götterdämmerung, in which the four elements blend like so many leitmotifs, at the confluence of all aesthetics: orchestral gigantism, operatic lyricism and nascent impressionism.