In January 1941, 40,000 French prisoners lived in the STALAG VIIIA camp in Görlitz, among them the composer Olivier Messiaen. He finished his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps there under almost unimaginable conditions and performed it for the first time with three other fellow prisoners. »The audience was a very diverse mix of all walks of life – rural workers, auxiliaries, intellectuals, professional soldiers, doctors and clergy. “Never again have they listened to me with such attention and understanding as they did then,” the composer later recalled. As it says in a documentary by ARTE: »The first performance was attended by about 400 listeners. Starving, freezing people, far from their homeland – in the Silesian no man's land fascinated by this so strange, crystalline, transcendent music.« There are some chamber music works of the twentieth century for which you don't have to be a specialist in new music to be deeply touched by them. They push the doors to other dimensions wide open, lead us into other spheres of consciousness. This includes Messiaen's spiritual Quatuor pour la fin du temps , but it also includes Bartók's magnificent Trio Contrasts , written just over a year before Messiaen's quartet. How Bartók translates the old Hungarian verbunkos dance into the tonal language of the 20th century, how he fuses elements of jazz and new music, how he assigns instruments their own contrasting roles – this is still new, exciting, moving today. The great jazz clarinetist had commissioned the work from Béla Bartók shortly before his emigration to America. Two works by exiles, prisoners, which still grip us today as if they were written only yesterday – in a way that only great chamber music can! In between, the piano trio by Leonard Bernstein, the composer of West Side Story , written a year earlier than Bartók's Contrasts: a youthful work, a wild and yet compelling mix in which Bernstein takes us on a trip through counterpoint and atonality, through Gypsy style and jazz, through zones of calm and breathless chase.

Elia Tagliavia

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Jun 10, 2024

To the End of Time · Beethoven Orchester Bonn

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Piano in Piano Trio by Bernstein

Beethoven Orchester Bonn

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