Klein, String Trio; Smit, Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano; Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
This concert was preceded by an hour or so with a lecturer from the Birmingham Conservatoire talking about Messiaen, with the aid of two of the evening’s players to provide musical illustrations. One of the fascinating things we learned is that Messiaen was a veritable thieving magpie among composers, constantly using and re-using segments of other people’s music. There was a brief extract from the Prelude to Boris Godunov which is used several times in the Quartet, as an example. We also heard a recording of birds singing outside Messiaen’s country summer composing house – they were extremely loud, and insistent their voices should be heard on his music! The cellist spoke about how difficult it was to sustain the long high notes of her glorious duet with the piano in the middle of the work. The lecturer pointed out how consistently Messiaen had worked on the Christian concepts of heaven, hell and eternity throughout his long life of composing, exemplifying this by looking at the Quartet, near the beginning of his career, and Eclairs sur l’au-dela, written 40 years later All in all, a very absorbing hour………..
The two compositions by Klein and Smit, who were both murdered in Nazi extermination camps., are very different in style. The Klein work was the more immediate and gripping. and i think one would feel that, even if you didn’t know that it was completed 9 days before he was transported to Auschwitz. Its writing is raw and bitter at times but it also uses Czech folk music, sometimes almost violently as though the composer is grabbing onto aspects of normal life, unwilling to let go. Smit (who was Dutch) had a more formal distanced style – it was written in 1938 – and had less intensity. I wasn’t as engaged with it.
The Messiaen Quartet i have heard several times live. The Crucible music in the round space is ideal for this work – you experience its drama at very close quarters. All four musicians conveyed the sense of both fear and bliss which any good performance of this work must have, and clarinet, violin and cello played their big moments superbly. Gemma Rosefield and Benjamin Nabarro held the audience spellbound in the quiet beauty of their playing (except for the idiot who audibly moved out of his seat upstairs before the music faded into silence at the end). I don’t find this work easy listening but somehow you know – and you could feel everybody else in the audience knew – that every note counts in this piece and you have to listen intently. There was a rare stillness in the audience [apart from the idiot at the end) and at the end, after the whisper of the violin dies into silence, stomping of approval on the wooden floor and tiers
John's musical journey 