A Messaienic Vision

JUST AFTER the fall of France in 1940, the Germans seized composer Olivier Messaien and took him to a concentration camp in desolate Silesia. Confined in Stalag VIII, undernourished and brutalized, he created perhaps his greatest piece the Quartet for the End of Time. He wrote it for the few available musicians and with them performed it there in the barracks.

The cellist played an instrument with only three strings, and Messaien did his best on a piano with several broken keys. Together with a clarinetist and a violinist, heavily clothed against the extreme cold, they performed one of the masterpieces of 20th century chamber music for an audience of soldiers, workers, and farmers, their fellow prisoners of the Third Reich.

The lack of food in the Stalag had caused Messaien to have a hallucination of "the rainbow of the Angel amid strange shifting colors"--the destroying angel from the Book of Revelations who announces the "end of time" at the apocalypse. This vision, embodying the extreme terror of the end of the world and the perfect peace that must follow is the essence of this remarkable piece. With his highly individual blend of Hindu rhythms, natural sounds like bird songs, and suggestive harmonic textures. Messaien has created music of the greatest emotional power that is at the same time an expression of profound religious devotion.

Last Friday at Kirkland House, four fine musicians gave an intense and memorable performance of this quartet, revealing its masterful qualities through the vividness of their playing. The music makes extreme emotional and technical demands, but clarinetist David Kass, pianist Hugh Wolff, violinist Lynn Chang, and cellist Craig Hogan rose impressively to the challenge.

In the long and tortuous "Abyss of the Birds" movement. Kass showed clearly that he is the best clarinetist around. He tossed off the violent and jagged melodic lines with ease. Breathtakingly soft attacks in the highest register were followed by harrowing crescendoes without the slightest wavering in pitch. Wolff, although he had no comparable solo, sensitively handled the shifting harmonies, providing the quartet with a sure base for their soaring and sometimes frantically demonic melodies. The piece is full of fast unison passages for the strings which would glaringly expose any inconsistency in rhythm or pitch. Chang and Hogan played best in these sections that would have frazzled the nerves and ears of lesser musicians.

The four musicians convincingly transmitted a powerful and unified conception of the piece to a rapt audience. Those who bemoan the state of musical performance at Harvard will have to find someone other than undergraduate musicians to blame.

ALSO ON THE program was Messaien's The Blackbird, a work from a later period when he because fascinated by the sound of bird songs. Marilyn Chohaney handled the rhythmically in tricate flute part with disarming ease and received highly sensitive accompaniment from Hugh Wolff.

In a century when the greatest composers have struggled to create intellectually satisfying structures. Messaien wrote music which he hoped would "delight the auditory senses with delicate, voluptuous pleasures." His music is sensuous and evocative, with an emotional immediacy painfully lacking in most contemporary music. His naive, naturalistic brand of Catholic mysticism, which in his later years took the form of an obsession with birds, provided him with a focus and an organizing principle for his music that other 20th century composers have lacked. Because he no longer needed to search for self-definition with each work, he felt free to write music to charm and involve us.

A profound religious devotion pervades all of Messaien's compositions. Through superb craft, he communicates this to us in the most vivid terms. As the music slowly ascends at the sublimely peaceful ending of the Quartet, we are drawn willingly with it toward Messaein's mystic vision.