24 November 2008     

RAGNAROK ENSEMBLE

Katherine Spencer clarinet, Chris George violin, Matthew Sharp  cello, Sam Haywood  piano

This group of brilliant young musicians came together as "Ragnarok" to give performances of Messiaen's great "Quartet for the End of Time" as well as other works.

Programme

Beethoven   Clarinet Trio Op 11

Mendelssohn   Piano Trio in D minor Op 49

Messiaen   Quartet for the End of Time (1941)

The Beethoven and Mendelssohn are classics of their time and both of them enjoy enormous popularity. Light-hearted in character, they form the perfect contrast to the seriousness of the Messiaen that follows.

In 1940, Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) was interned in a German prison camp, where he discovered among his fellow prisoners a clarinettist, a violinist and a cellist. The success of a short trio which he wrote for them led him to add seven more movements to this Interlude, and a piano to the ensemble, to create the Quartet for the End of Time.  Messiaen and his friends first performed it for their 5000 fellow prisoners on January 15, 1941.

If the plain facts of the work's origins are simple, the spiritual facts are far more complex. Messiaen's religious mysticism found a point of departure for the Quartet in the passage in the Book of Revelation about the descent of the seventh angel, at the sound of whose trumpet the mystery of God will be consummated, and who announces "that there should be time no longer." According to the composer, the Quartet was intended not to be a commentary on the Apocalypse, nor to refer to his own captivity, but to be a kind of musical extension of the Biblical account, and of the concept of the end of Time as the end of past and future and the beginning of eternity. For Messiaen there was also a musical sense to the angel's announcement. His development of a varied and flexible rhythmic system, based in part on ancient Hindu rhythms, came to fruition in the Quartet, in which more or less literally Messiaen put an end to the equally measured "time" of western classical music. The architecture of the Quartet is both musical and mystical. There are eight movements because God rested on the seventh day after creation, a day which extended into the eighth day of timeless eternity. There are intricate thematic relationships, as for example between movements two and seven, both of which are about the angel; and stylistic and theological relationships, as between movements five and eight.

The Quartet is one of the supreme masterpieces of 20th century chamber music and an extraordinarily moving experience for the listener. No music lover should miss the chance of hearing this work live.