Most of Stanford Lively Arts' concert presentations avoid Memorial Church, perhaps because its acoustics are a bit too lively. But cellist Christopher Costanza finds the church's atmosphere "absolutely perfect ... The space was inspiring and pleasing on a number of levels." For Thursday’s concert of Quartet for the End of Time and other works by Olivier Messiaen, Costanza was joined by his St. Lawrence String Quartet colleague Scott St. John, along with two good friends and frequent collaborators, pianist Jamie Parker and clarinetist Todd Palmer.
St. Lawrence String Quartet
"Acoustically," adds Costanza, "it was a great space for the more sustained and singing movements" of the Messiaen work, "and possibly a bit too reverberant for the wild, driving, superintense music." Nonetheless, for music as religiously inspired as this, with its movement titles such as "Vocalise for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time" or "Mingling of Rainbows for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time," there can hardly be a more ideal space than the Memorial Church, with its statues, mosaics, and paintings of cherubs and seraphs on the floors, ceilings, and walls.
The church's resonance lent an otherworldly quality to the composition's sounds — a dreamy and blurry one. With a fade-out of five seconds, the powerful silences written in the score were superseded by echoes. This was a small price to pay, though, considering the beauty of those echoes, as well as the visual beauty all around.
Messiaen composed his quartet for violin, cello, clarinet, and piano and premiered it during his captivity at a German prisoner of war camp in 1941, one of humanity's darkest and most fateful years. Despite the horrors the world was experiencing at the time, Messiaen coped by conveying a sense of transcendence and hope in his music. The quartet also contains moments of despair and frustration, to be sure, but overall, the listener is left with a resigned peace.
Sublime Uplift
The most amazing moment of the concert — for that matter, one of the more amazing moments of my life — was Palmer's solo clarinet rendition of "The Abyss of the Birds." In this atonal wandering, which has no beginning and no end, Palmer employed literally breathtaking crescendos that originated in utter silence and progressed through an infinitely smooth gradient to intense shrieks. It was a remarkable display of the clarinet's dynamic possibilities, as well as a time-suspending communication of the composer's hope in the face of hopelessness. The reverberations added to the smoothness of the sound.
Palmer was even quoted in the program booklet as saying, "I know that performing this piece at Stanford's beautiful Memorial Church will make this evening a memory that is not ephemeral but eternal."
On cello, Costanza contributed a memorable, warmly played "Praise for the Eternity of Jesus." His vibrato varied from nonexistent to intense and almost pitch-altering. Also noteworthy were his glissandi (slides) that spanned the entire length of the string with almost finger-slicing speed in some of the faster movements. Having studied this piece under the guidance of Messiaen himself, Costanza recalls the composer "asking for more and more dynamic extremes, especially those on the loud side, and his demonstrations every time he sat down at the piano were quite remarkable, especially in his ability to clarify single voices in his complex chordal writing." Dynamic contrast was certainly a strong element of the Stanford performance, though at times the ensemble held back, perhaps reluctant to overwhelm the church's sensitive echoes.
The response to the "Eternity of Jesus" movement is the "Immortality of Jesus" movement, for violin, played by St. John, which ends the piece. His miraculous bow control allowed for flawless execution of endlessly meandering lines, culminating with a quiet yet climactic fade-out in the outermost reaches of the violin's high register. Throughout the work, Parker provided sensitive piano accompaniment and somehow managed to keep the instrument sounding crisp and clear in the "wet" acoustic space.
Distancing Mystical Reflections
In the second half of the concert, Stanford University organist Robert Huw Morgan played selections from Messiaen's organ works. After the intimacy of the End of Time, the organ felt distant and almost inhumane. With the performer sitting way up in the loft it was difficult to make a personal connection with the music and the musician, which is one of the primary reasons for coming to a concert, as opposed to listening to a recording. Messiaen's organ works are even more far-out than the quartet: They are mystical inner reflections of a solitary mind, and are both reverie-inducing and difficult to follow. Occasionally they yank the listener out of a daze with extra articulations or unexpected consonances from the sea of typically Messiaenesque, densely colorful dissonances.
This all-Messiaen concert was part of Stanford Lively Arts' celebration of the composer's centenary. In January, the Quartet for the End of Time will be performed in a reimagined electronic rendition for cello and electronics. In February, a concert of Messiaen's piano pieces will be presented. All these concerts provide wonderful opportunities for listeners seeking to expand the horizons of their musical experiences, as Messiaen's was a strange and unique mind whose musical style is matched by no other.
