I have to confess, I hadn’t been sure what to expect when I heard about The Art of Fugue staged with acrobats. This latest collaborative experiment in the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes 2026 season – the multi-arts festival with orchestral music at its centre – sounded somewhat counterintuitive; one of the Western canon’s most cerebral works twinned with an extrovert celebration of the human body.
Messiaen’s Turangalîla, his sprawling 10-movement, 75-minute extravaganza, is garish, graphic and glorious. It is a full-bore, Technicolor, over-the-top, spectacular blast of orchestral fireworks from beginning to end. It is, as the kids say, “a lot”.
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