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Released On: 06 Mar 2022. Available for 29 days
The BBC Symphony Orchestra's Total Immersion 'Music for the End of Time' in January this year focused on the Theresienstadt Ghetto of the 1940s. Here many of the finest musical talents of the time were held pawns in an appalling Nazi propaganda exercise, then taken to the concentration camps from which they never returned. Over the course of a day at the Barbican, to reflect their fate, the number of performers on the Barbican stage dwindled from full orchestra to conclude with just four.
Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time for fellow musicians imprisoned with him in 1941 in a Silesian camp, saying of the premiere: ‘never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension’.
Outstanding musicians from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama gave a performance described by The Guardian as 'sensationally played'. Recorded at the Barbican on Sunday 23rd January 2022
Presented by Georgia Mann Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time
Sabine Sergejeva (Violin)
Ben Tarlton (Cello)
Cara Doyle (Clarinet)
Ben Smith (Piano)
From notes from a 5 December, 2021 performance, now deleted
Messiaen's spiritual masterpiece, Quartet for the end of Time, written while the composer was imprisoned by the Nazis in Stalag VIII-A at Gorlitz and first performed in the camp to the other prisoners. He took his inspiration from texts in the Book of Revelations: a mighty angel, apocalyptic scenes, birdsong, heavenly silence and the end of time itself.
A Note of Reconciliation
The senior civil servant, now retired
Neither knows nor does not know
There shall be no more time,
And he continued flicking through the TV News.
And the Apocalyptic angel
Sware by him that lives forever and ever,
who created all things
That there should be time no longer.
So an opportune shopkeeper opened a shop
And advertised hundreds and hundreds of gallons of time
And the people all came for his glistening cartons
And bought all his packets of time.
And the shopkeeper died
And they opened their packets
And they found there was
No
More
Time
And all the little people shouted out
There will be time
There will be time
There will be time
Until there was time no longer
Which meant they didn’t.
Steven Willett, June 5, 1972
Evanston Township High School, Illinois, U.S.A.
The quotation is from the King James Version of the Book of Revelations 10 v.6
I discovered from the programme notes of the superb first concert of the RNCM New Ensemble on October 21, 1996 that Olivier Messiaen was inspired by this quote to write his amazing "Quartet for the End of Time" while in a concentration camp during World War II. It used to be the most popular of the poems that I perform.
I met Messiaen's widow in 1998 at a dress rehearsal of his huge oratorio, Saint Francis of Assisi in four acts of over five hours.
We were told Yvonne Loriod was in the audience during the first interval and I spent the second act rehearsing my high school French to ask for her address and tell her that I thought her husband's "Turangalila Simphonie" was the only piece of music that was exciting as Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" and that I had taken a group of 17 friends to hear it in one of the opening concerts by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra on 22 September, 1996. I asked her would she give me her address so I could practice writing in French to her.
She used her Zen meditation to look at my mind and could immediately see my long history of mental hospital admissions but let me see how important was their appreciation of fine French cooking and wines.
I could also see that shining like a diamond through here personality was the fact that she regarded his Quartet For the End of Time as by far her husbands's finest masterpiece.
She declined to give me her address.
Olivier Messiaen was ground crew in the French Air Force and wrote the Quartet in a prisoner of war camp with the only available instruments, an upright piano, a violin, a clarinet and a cello bought by a collection from the prisoners and guards.
He said the audience in the yard of the prison was the most appreciative he had ever had.
Not the cheapest but the version I have. MESSIAEN Quartet for the End of Time Vogt van Keulen etc new sealed BBC CD album | eBay
£4.99
MESSIAEN Quartet for the End of Time Vogt van Keulen etc new sealed BBC ...
Isabelle van Keulen (Violin). Lars Vogt (Piano). Product of BBC Music Magazine. BBC Proms Live 20th July 1999. £4.99 or $6.60
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