The theory of transportation of mesure for general cost functions is used to obtain a novel logarithmic Sobolev inequality for measures on phase spaces of high dimension and hence a concentration of measure inequality. The are applications to Plancherel measure associated with the symmetric group, the distribution of Young diagrams partitioning N as N tends to infinity and to the mean field theory of random matrices. For the portential Gamma (N+1), the generalized orthogonal ensemble and its empirical eigenvalue distribution satisfy a Gaussian concentration of measure phenomenon. Hence the empirical eigenvalue distribution converges weakly almost surely as the matix size increases; the limiting density is given by the derivative of the Vershik probability density.