A symphony of ‘brothel music’

Damian Thompson never fails to intrigue.http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/reviews/r0000318.shtml
I admit that listening to Messiaen is sometimes a profound, transcendent, religious experience, (ooh, deep and high at the same time?) ... and sometimes it just makes me feel inferior, like my mind is inferior, my musicianship is inferior, my very EARS are inferior, "What the heck IS that that everyone else gets and I just don't ??!?#?%?^??!"
I don't know this piece :

There can be no serious competition for the title of the most Catholic composer of the 20th century. Olivier Messiaen was incapable of writing so much as an advertising jingle without calling it Dance of the solar system as the Archangels sing the Five Glorious Mysteries to the Infant Jesus as He contemplates the face of the Virgin.I'm being facetious, but you get my point. Well, two points, actually. Messiaen - whose centenary falls this year - was as ostentatiously Roman Catholic as it is possible to be, judging by the titles of his works. Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus, La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ and so on. Yet, if you listened blind to the Vingt Regards, not knowing their beautiful subtitles, would you guess that this was Catholic music? Every note the great French composer wrote was infused by his faith, yet some of it sounds not just secular but non-Catholic. It really is as if he had given a jingle a sacred title.The Turangalîla-Symphonie is a case in point. This 10-movement score is a hymn to "a joy that is superhuman, overflowing, blinding, unlimited". It is the love of God, but filtered through the passion of Tristan and Iseult and expressed in a Hawaiian cocktail of top-heavy harmonies, shaken and stirred by exotic polyrhythms. If Debussy, living in retirement in Bali, had been commissioned by Hitchcock to write a film score and then Lenny Bernstein had tinkered with it, Turangalîla might have been the result. The Art of Fugue it ain't. Pierre Boulez called it "brothel music", which was a bit of a nerve, as he was studying with the composer at the time. Yet I knew what he meant, even listening to the fine performance given by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw under Neeme Järvi at the Barbican. Alex Ross, in his history of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise, describes one of the work's piano chords "played as a slow, slinky arpeggio, in the manner of a cocktail-lounge pianist". Which was exactly how Jean-Yves Thibaudet played it and - not wanting to be rude - exactly what he looked like. His (lilac?) shirt was opened almost to the waist, revealing gold neckwear; apparently he was dressed by Dame Vivienne Westwood. Somehow one doesn't expect a pianist who models himself on Sacha Distel to negotiate Messiaen's barbarously complex, literally fist-pounding cadenzas with such refined intelligence. But this was a performance every bit as satisfying as Pierre-Laurent Aimard's with the Berlin Philharmonic on Teldec. More so, in places. Where the score limited him to a single repeated right-hand note, Thibaudet produced a display of calibrated dynamics that carried us through an entire spectrum of colour. Indeed, in the "Garden of Love's Sleep", his delicate meanderings achieved the improvisatory quality of Alfred Cortot, than which there can be no higher praise for a French pianist. (Cortot playing Turangalîla? It's an intriguing thought but, given the savage demands of the solo part, perhaps not.)The other solo instrument in the symphony is the ondes martinot, whose 1940s electronic wail was slightly subdued in this performance. No bad thing: it reduced the flavour of a freak show that can spoil this work. Järvi's direction occasionally lost focus _- but given that he was standing in for Mariss Jansons at almost zero notice, he achieved miracles. Is Turangalîla a masterpiece? It comes close, and would come closer if it was 10 minutes shorter. Is it Catholic? I'm not sure, but Messiaen would certainly have said so.