Christoph Eschenbach is nearing the end of an extraordinary first year as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. A season of rather remarkable programming reaches its spiritual pinnacle with this week’s concerts, when the NSO will give three performances of one of the monuments of the 20th-century orchestral repertoire, Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie (March 10-12). Eschenbach’s predecessor, Leonard Slatkin, led a performance of this immense and phantasmagorical work ten years ago, and Eschenbach returns to it in the context of this month’s maximum INDIA festival at the Kennedy Center (some of the rhythmic patterns in the work are based on Indian Tālas). Messiaen derived the work’s title from two Sanskrit words meaning “the flow of time” and “cosmic play,” and he described it as a “love song and hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life, and death.”