"Classic Asia" is the theme of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's new year concerts, a series of programmes that reveal how the music of the east permeated the 20th-century western tradition. This concert juxtaposed the most monumental product of that tendency, Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, with a sample of the music from the Indian classical tradition that shaped it, performed by the Birmingham-based Sabri Ensemble. Though there was hardly time to scratch the surface of these traditions of immense subtlety and sophistication, it was still a valuable experiment in cultural comparisons.
There is not much that's explicitly eastern about Turangalila other than its Indian rhythmic patterns. And as with nearly all Messiaen's music, the springboard for this grandiose hymn to love and life was his Roman Catholic faith: the work may not be overtly devotional, but it is an act of contemplation. That's what binds the rambling 10-movement structure, imposes coherence on the disparate musical elements and excuses its lapses of musical taste, too.
This was the kind of performance, though, that made no apologies. The conductor was Kazushi Ono, the pianist Joanna MacGregor and the ondes martenot player Takashi Harada - a team that clearly knows the work well, and can maintain its momentum even in those moments when the invention flags. MacGregor's cadenzas were explosively dramatic, while Harada's phrasing was musical and inventive on what is a deeply unattractive instrument.
The CBSO played the huge score with great panache. Ono is a punchy yet carefully detailed conductor, exactly the right kind of interpreter for music in which passing sensations are much more important than long-range musical architecture.
· Repeated at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, tomorrow. Box office: 0121-780 3333.
