For months I thought it was because of where I lived that the second thing I did in the morning was run to the news sites to see if we were in a nuclear war or the like. Then I heard that my friends on your side of the drink were doing the same thing. It too often does feel like the end of days. I find my own ability to take consolation in music fading.
But recently it returned, from a place I should have thought to look but somehow hadn't: Olivier Messiaen's "Quatuour pour le fin de temps" ("Quartet for the End of Time") in Sony's astonishingly fine new recording. Not only can I not get it out of my mind, it's made me rethink, and feel again, a work close to my heart.
The story of its composition never loses its power. The best retelling of it I know is in Richard Powers' music-drenched novel "Orfeo," but the bare-bones version is this. Messiaen was a prisoner of war in a German camp, keeping himself spiritually alive with a score of Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande," when a guard gave him a gift of a pencil and some paper.
In transit to the camp, Stalag VIII-A, Messiaen had shown sketches of a nascent clarinet solo to a clarinetist fellow-captive. It grew into the work's third and most haunting movement, for solo clarinet. If you know anything about Messiaen, it's probably that he drew both inspiration and actual music from bird song; this movement is entitled "Abyss of the birds."
Such instruments, mostly battered, as could be rounded up in the camp were a clarinet, a violin, a barely payable cello and an old, out-of-tune old piano, for which Messiaen conceived his quartet. Most remarkably of all, the piece was played in the camp, outdoors on a cold and rainy January 15, 1941. Some 400 fellow prisoners - and their guards - listened in rapt silence.
Despite its being a comparatively early composition for Messiaen, and its extreme compression, it contains in capsule virtually everything in the composer's music to follow, including its fabled (devoutly Catholic) mysticism. There's ferocity in it (the sixth movement, for all four instruments, is a "dance of fury"), but far more music of profound interiority alternating with ecstatic transcendence.
Since many of my favorite musicians (including the composer) have recorded it, there aren't many recordings I lack, or would leave behind. But this version takes the piece farther in all directions than any other version I know, maximizing its expressivity without violating its core spiritual intimacy.
The music-making-by Martin Frost, clarinet; Janine Jansen, violin; Torleef Thedeen, cello; and Lucas Debargue, piano-is achingly cross-reflective and -expanding. The two movements named "Louange" ("Praise," first for the "Eternity," then, and finally, for the "Immortality" of Jesus) find Messiaen at his most radiant. We music critics like to talk about performances in which time stops, but here "Time" stops, expands, enlarges and vanishes along the contours of hearts' deepest desires. The ensemble is immaculate, moving like a single creature with many minds. Frost, first among equals, takes the clarinet, the instrument the greatest composers have loved, places it has not previously visited.
Debargue, who in the "Quatuour" goes up against some of the greatest of pianists, also has a new solo CD (Sony) that marks him as an important, individual voice in the remarkable ranks of young pianists today. He offers two far-too-seldom-played Schubert sonatas and gay composer Karol Szymanowski's boundary-pushing, intense Second Sonata, from 1911.
Even at its softest and most delicate, there's intensity in Debargue's sound, the kind that carries across rests. His touch is exact and sure, deliberate, even determined, stopping just this side of aggressive. It negotiates extremes without testing them. Listening to his Schubert A-minor, the D.784, one that can so easily veer off into its extremes, the first thing I noticed was that while the sound was not relaxed, as a listener I was, as confident of Debargue's playing and grasp of the piece as he was.
The concluding Allegro vivace was just as allegro and vivace as anyone could want while retaining a diamantine clarity. The deceptively light A-major Sonata, D. 664, is its perfect complement, its aural simplicity an invitation to appreciate Debargue's quick, mercurial mind at work.
In its wake, the Szymanowski arrives like a tumult. The sonata is the bridge between the late Romaniticism he inherited and the unleashing of his own, highly individual style. Arthur Rubinstein played the premiere, Richter was one of its proponents, and its sheer difficulty has kept it in the hands of pianists with the requisite imagination and daring.
Debargue gives it an elemental, then alchemical reading. Szymanowksi's music can feel elusive, but Debargue's pellucid, incandescent playing, reveling in architecture, is a crystalline marvel.