Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet

Program Note

Olivier Messiaen was working as a nurse in the French army when he was captured by Nazi soldiers in 1940. He was sent to a POW camp that he had no idea if he was ever to leave. While conditions there were not the same as those of the notorious extermination camps, they were still horrific, and it is small wonder that the composer had visions of the end of the world. The Quatour pour le fin du temps is in every way the work of a great artist facing death: at once terrifying, glorious, mystical, and sublime. Messiaen, who was a devout Catholic, was inspired by the visions of Armageddon found in the Book of Revelations. In the score itself he added the following preface:

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire… and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth… And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever… that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished…

The soldiers at the POW camp made allowances for the composer, permitting access to a piano and the use of music paper. While there, he met a clarinetist, violinist and pianist, and he wrote a solo clarinet piece as well as a short trio that he could play with the strings. These projects coalesced to become one of the great chamber pieces of the twentieth century. The Quatour was premiered at the camp—accounts differ as to attendance, but the guards and prisoners stood together listening on a cold and damp January as Messiaen and friends performed outside on dilapidated instruments.…

The third movement, “Abyss of the Birds,” is one of the most well-known pieces of music for solo clarinet. It exploits the full dynamic and expressive range of the instrument, passing between short outbursts of birdsong and long crescendos from nothing to breathtakingly loud, as if sounding from the abyss itself.…

In a preface to the score, Messiaen later added his own comments for each of the movements:

3. Abyss of the birds. Clarinet alone. The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.

©2009 David Ludwig

Nicholas Cords, viola

Program Note

The viola is seemingly just a big violin but tuned a fifth lower. In reality the two instruments are worlds apart. They both have three strings in common, the A, D and G string. The high E-string lends the violin a powerful luminosity and metallic penetrating tone which is missing in the viola. The violin leads, the viola remains in the shade. In return the low C-string gives the viola a unique acerbity, compact, somewhat hoarse, with the aftertaste of wood, earth and tannic acid.

Two chamber music works awoke my love of the C-string many years ago; in Schubert's last string quartet (in G major) and in the slow movement of Schumann's Piano Quintet the dark elegance of the viola comes to the fore also often in orchestral works by Berlioz. In 1990 I heard Tabea Zimmermann play the viola in a WDR concert in Cologne; her particularly vigorous and pithy - and yet always tender - C-string was the starting point for my fantasies of a viola sonata. With the plan of a sonata to be written later already in my head, I wrote the short viola piece Loop (now the second movement of the sonata) in 1991 as a birthday present for Alfred Schlee, the excellent publisher. In 1993 I wrote Facsar (now the third movement) in remembrance of my dear composition teacher Sándor Veress who died in Bern and who was an unjustly neglected composer - his music must be performed again! It was also in 1993 that Klaus Klein enquired about a first performance in Gütersloh and Tabea Zimmermann agreed to play the complete sonata. The movements 1, 4, 5 and 6 are therefore new; I dedicated the two outer movements to Tabea Zimmermann, the fourth movement to Klaus Klein and the fifth to Louise Duchesneau, my colleague of many years.

3rd movement Facsar: The title is a Hungarian verb meaning "to wrestle" or "to distort". In Hungarian this word is also associated with the bitter sensation felt in the nose when one is about to cry. It is also a double-stopping movement, a type of measured dance with displaced twisted modulations: pseudo-tonal.

© György Ligeti