Cynthia Millar goes from classical to ‘Heavy Metal’ with her pre-synth sonic wonder, the ondes martenot.

A quick survey of the soloists for this season’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts reveals the following statistics: eight pianists, eight violinists, three cellists, 13 assorted vocalists, a bassoonist, a clarinetist, a French horn player, a violist and a percussionist. And one player of the ondes martenot.

The what?

The ondes martenot is an early electronic keyboard instrument that can be made to sound like every other instrument on that list--and then some. It was invented in 1928 by a Frenchman, Maurice Martenot, looking to harness radio waves--the word ondes means wave in French. Its greatest feature is its ethereal approximation of the human voice, albeit a voice capable of superhuman strength and power. With a huge dynamic range, it can instantly launch from the faintest midnight whisper to the roar of an entire orchestra through a stack of Marshall amps.

The soloist in question is ondiste Cynthia Millar, 39, a tall, pleasant and extremely articulate Englishwoman who divides her time between London and Santa Monica. She and her instrument are on call for orchestral work all over the world, and she also plays and composes for the movies.

Millar is one of two featured players (the other is pianist Paul Crossley) joining the orchestra this week for the “Turangali^la” Symphony by French composer Olivier Messiaen. One of the most extravagant works in the 20th century repertory, it’s something of a specialty for Esa-Pekka Salonen, who’ll be conducting it, along with Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

It’s also something of a specialty for Millar, who has played it many times over the past 10 years, with such conductors as Andre Previn, Mark Elder and Simon Rattle. “It is,” Millar says, “just the most joyful piece I can ever imagine being part of.”

Millar’s instrument was one of the first electronic sound synthesizers ever developed. Like the theremin, a similar invention from the ‘20s, the ondes martenot manipulates radio waves made by oscillators. Both instruments’ signature sounds are soaring and swooping glissandos.

The ondes is much more versatile and precisely controlled. It’s shaped like a small spinet piano or electric organ, with a six-octave keyboard on which a melody is played with the right hand. At the same time, the player puts his or her left hand on a large key off to the left of the keyboard; this determines the duration and volume of the notes played, much the way a player’s breath does for a woodwind instrument. Various buttons and knobs can be used for effects, and the amplified sound emerges from a combination of three speakers, one of which is made of a brass gong.

Moving the keys laterally makes vibrato, various buttons and knobs can be used for effects--but it’s not the keys or the buttons that produce the ondes’ wild glissandos: Those derive from a wire built into the front of the keyboard. Called a ruban, or ribbon, it is activated when the player inserts his or her finger into a metal ring and slides it along the wire. To imagine a crass if familiar version of the resulting tone, think of the sound that usually accompanies a clown slipping on a banana peel.

The instrument was fairly well-known by 1948, when “Turangali^la” was completed. It was used in concert pieces by 1930s modernists such as Honegger and Varese and for sound effects in the Folies Bergere and French theater. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians calls it “one of the most successful electronic musical instruments developed before the synthesizer.”

Millar was introduced to the instrument in 1981. To backtrack a bit, she grew up in a village halfway between London and Oxford, the daughter of two prominent art historians. (Her father, Sir Oliver Millar, is surveyor to the royal art collection, and her mother, Delia Millar, cataloged Queen Victoria’s watercolors.) She played the piano growing up and retained her interest in music while getting a degree in English literature from Oxford.

After graduating, Millar returned to music, working as an assistant to American film composer Elmer Bernstein. When they heard about the ondes at a seminar in 1981, Bernstein’s and Millar’s interest was piqued. Seeking some “magical” sounds for a film score he was composing (for the recently reissued “Heavy Metal”) and a Broadway show he was writing called “Young Merlin,” Bernstein asked Millar to find out more.

“I was curious,” Millar recalls, “because I remembered so clearly the first time I ever heard it. I was about 13 years old, hearing a radio performance of the ‘Trois Petites Liturgies’ [by Messiaen] and going, ‘Oh God, what a smashing sound.’ But, it never occurred to me to track it down.

“Elmer asked me if I could research enough about it so I could then tell another musician how best to use it. So I found the man who later became my first teacher, John Morton, and he showed me the instrument and how it worked. I was just completely fascinated because, while I was at Oxford, I’d played stringed instruments and sung a lot and obviously had always been a pianist. So all these things I had done were like practice for this thing.”

The plan was for Millar to learn enough about the instrument that she could turn around and teach it to an American player for “Merlin.” “But,” she recalls, “it soon became apparent that this instrument is not easy to learn fast, and it needs to be in the right hands because it could really turn quite excruciating.”

So Millar ended up going to New York herself and playing the ondes in a pit band for four months. Working with hard-boiled Broadway players was a lot of fun, she says, and it was a kind of performer’s finishing school. “What it taught me was to just play eight shows a week and whatever comes at you, you do it. The show had previewed for two months, which I think is still a record, so we were filling in new material all the time. It’s a great way of learning your way around an instrument.”

She’s since played the ondes martenot on many other Bernstein scores, including “Ghostbusters,” “My Left Foot,” “The Grfiters” and “The Age of Innocence,” as well as scores by other composers. She is, Bernstein says, a virtuoso: “Some ondistes bowl you over with a wall of sound, but not her. I compare her to Maria Callas who, as an opera singer, sang so musically.”

In 1990, Millar began to broaden her contribution to the movies she worked on. For “The Grifters,” for example, she did the electronic sound design and wrote some cues. She went on to compose entire scores for directors Peter Yates (“Run of the Country”), Arthur Penn (the TV movie “The Portrait”) and Martha Coolidge (“Three Wishes,” “Crazy in Love”).

“I truly didn’t have any ambitions to be a composer until the very late ‘80s,” Millar says. “I was fortunate to work with composers who have a tremendous sense of how music really works; it’s got to have rubbed off on me somehow. It’s fun to be able to use this instrument in my own scores.”

It’s also fun, she says, to play the instrument in front of a live audience, especially in a piece that is as flashy as the Messiaen “Turangali^la.”

Part of the composer’s “Tristan and Isolde” trilogy, the piece’s title is a compound of two Sanskrit words meaning, roughly, “speed” or “tempo,” and “the force of life.” Almost larger than life, the 10-movement, 75-minute symphony features a battery of six percussionists (including tubular bells) who combine with the solo piano to approximate an Indonesian gamelan sound. It’s had its share of detractors on its way to becoming part of the standard repertory--Pierre Boulez has referred to it as “bordello music.”

“It’s a real young man’s piece,” says pianist Crossley, who has played it with Millar many times and recorded it with Salonen. “Messiaen was right in the middle of what he called his most fertile period. He wanted everyone to know everything he could do. It doesn’t sound like difficult modern music; it grabs you from beginning to end.”

To Crossley, the ondes helps emphasize the passion and sexuality that the piece is supposed to evoke: “It’s your ultimate male or female, singing his or her heart out.”

For Millar, the piece is also a great way to make more converts to her instrument. “What’s lovely about it is you can come from absolutely nowhere to this really deafening huge sound. It can soar effortlessly over a symphony orchestra and indeed it will do. . . . When you’re [in the audience] looking at the orchestra, you’re saying, ‘How did she make that sound?’ ”

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LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC WITH CYNTHIA MILLAR, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $6 to $58. Phone: (213) 850-2000.