Quartet For The End Of Time
132 Hobson Street, CBD, Auckland
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Quartet for the End of Time – Olivier Messiaen
Performance of music and poetry, as part of the Auckland Climate Festival.
Katherine Austin piano, James Tennant cello, Peter Scholes clarinet, Simeon Broom violin.
Performance Poet Faumuina Felolini Maria Tafuna'i
This will be a reflective evening of music and poetry. The quartet is a famous 8 movement piece written by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) in a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. He was an organist / pianist, and in the camp, under trying conditions, there was also a violinist, a clarinetist and a cellist. Their instruments were in poor condition, and although they were suffering in a harsh setting, the camp commander allowed this piece to be performed.
“If I composed this quartet for anything," Messiaen wrote later, "It was to escape from the snow, the war, the captivity, to escape from myself. What I gained most of all from it was that, among three hundred thousand prisoners, I was perhaps the only one who wasn’t a prisoner.”
We too can feel trapped, even imprisoned, by an economic system based on over-consumption and growth far beyond the capacity of the Earth’s natural systems. In a sense we have arrived at an "end of time" where we cannot continue to live as we do. This music, at times angry, at times a lament, at times bursting with bird song, leads us to a place of simplicity and transcendent beauty, taking us to the core of our existence and a place of courage in the face of what we see happening in the world. It chirps, dances, sings, weeps and ends in reverence for that which is life sustaining.
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