Conductor Carlos Kalmar is making a long delayed return visit to the Utah Symphony next weekend.

The music director of the Oregon Symphony and the principal conductor of the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago, Kalmar is looking forward to returning to Abravanel Hall.

"I am very happy I can come back," he said in a phone interview from his home in Vienna. "I think the last time I was there was at the beginning of the '90s. I remember one of the pieces I conducted then was the Dvorak Rhapsody."

Larry Rachleff was scheduled to conduct this coming weekend's concerts but withdrew, and Kalmar was hired to replace him. The program will remain the same, however.

"I took the program as is," Kalmar said. "Usually when you take over for someone, you make a change or two. But I looked at it and decided to keep it because it is an interesting program."

The concert will open with Olivier Messiaen's "Oiseux exotiques" ("Exotic Birds") with symphony pianist Jason Hardink. "It's a fantastic piece, but it's also the most challenging (on this program) for the audience," said Kalmar, who knows it well. "I conducted it last season in Finland with Jean-Philippe Collard, and it is always worth revisiting."

Kalmar believes that Messiaen's music deserves to be played. "We need to do his music. He is such an important composer that we cannot neglect him."

Hardink agrees. "Messiaen is one of the greatest composers of all time," he told the Deseret News. "It's a mystical experience when you hear or play his music."

While he was a student at Rice University, Hardink played the piece under David Cho, who is the Utah Symphony's current associate conductor and who at the time was a fellow student. "That was in 2002, and it was one of the first pieces by Messiaen that I played," Hardink said.

He was enthralled by the piece and began exploring Messiaen's oeuvre thoroughly, eventually getting his doctorate on Messiaen from Rice.

"Oiseux exotiques," written between 1955-56, is one of the composer's most innovative and compelling compositions. As the title implies, bird song figures prominently in the 15-minute-long piece. And it places huge demands on the pianist.

"It's challenging," Hardink said. "The cadenzas especially are really, really difficult."

Messiaen's music is complex, and there is no getting around that, Hardink said. "A lot happens in a short space of time, but what makes this piece interesting is how he evokes bird song. It may come across as atonal and angular, but he channels the joyous feeling created by birds singing. And it's so varied and ultimately what Messiaen does is capture the feeling of what it's like listening to nature."