Why you should not miss the Quartet for the End of time.

We will perform this work for our First Tuesday Concert in May, and you should mark your calendar now.  Read the following blog excerpt from blogger and superb pianist, Jeremy Denk about playing the piano part in Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”:

Somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a “mantra”: extatique, paradisiaque.  And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!):  people’s eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness.  (This is sentimental, too personal:  I know. How can write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?)  I felt that same sense of outpouring (“pouring over”) that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself – and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano.  And each chord is even more beautiful that the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant…each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable…and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to “move yourself,”  to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over….When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.