River Oaks Chamber Orchestra to perform Messiaen piece
There’s only one piece on Sunday’s chamber music concert at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston — but it’s a big one.
The piece is Olivier Messiaen’s expansive “Quartet for the End of Time,” written in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. The performers will be four members of the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra.
For clarinetist Maiko Sasaki, the concert will mark the fulfilment of an ambition born three years ago when she performed at Holocaust Museum Houston.
“Seeing the museum was a really devastating experience for me,” Sasaki said, “and I felt that we should perform Messiaen’s quartet, to give hope and to elevate the spirit.”
The eight-movement piece is scored for an unusual combination of instruments: violin, clarinet, cello and piano. For this performance, Sasaki will be joined by violinist Ertan Torgul, cellist Courtenay Vandiver Pereira and pianist Makiki Hirata.
“Messiaen wrote for these particular instruments,” Sasaki said, “because these were the only instruments available in the prison camp. Messiaen was fortunate that one of the German guards knew he was a composer. He was given a pencil and paper, and access to a piano, to write the music. I can’t imagine what it was like to compose under those conditions.”
The composer was 31 years old when he joined the French army at the outbreak of World War II. In 1940, he was captured by German forces and sent to Stalag VIII-A in Poland. In January 1941, he and three other musicians in the camp performed the “Quartet for the End of Time” for the prisoners and guards, the most attentive audience he ever played for, Messiaen later claimed.
Sasaki also knows the strong effect the “Quartet for the End of Time” can have on listeners. She first played the piece in a concert at Rice University a few years ago, and she vividly recalls the audience’s response.
“After the last note,” she says, “everyone sat in total silence. Nobody made a sound. It was strange. They were experiencing the timelessness of the piece. It was a very special feeling for me, and I’ve never experienced it with any other music.”
Messiaen’s source of inspiration for the piece was the Bible’s Book of Revelation, in which St. John the Divine recorded his apocalyptic vision of the world’s end. Titles of some of the movements — such as the “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus” and the “Vocalise, for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time” — place Messiaen’s devout Catholicism front and center.
As well, Sasaki notes other influences.
“Messiaen was an ornithologist; he liked to study birds,” she points out. “He was the first composer to precisely transcribe bird songs as music, and to include them in his compositions. Also, Messiaen wasn’t satisfied with conventional rhythms. So he invented a different musical language, based on Greek and Hindu rhythms. And he used extremely slow tempos, to express the idea of timelessness.”
Sunday’s performance owas originally intended to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. But in light of recent events in France, the musicians have also decided to dedicate their concert to the victims of the Paris bombings.
“Whether you are Christian or not,” Sasaki said, “this piece has the power to evoke powerful feelings in people.”