Music for the End of Time

The Roeland Hendrikx Ensemble are holding a candlelit concert in the atmospheric Great Barn at Hellens.

Olivier Messiaen was captured by the Germans in 1940; the madness of a second great war within just a few decades left its mark on the deeply religious composer. The title of Quatuor pour la fin du temps reflects this wartime trauma, while the instrumentation for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano was determined by the availability of these instruments and their players in the Polish prisoner-of-war camp where Messiaen was interned. Nonetheless, the musical and spiritual programme of this brilliant work reaches beyond the limits of human time: Messiaen sought to break with the demands of musical time, releasing the forward momentum and the “dictatorship of musical metre” that characterised the music of his predecessors. In his Quatuor pour la fin du temps, Messiaen implements this utopian vision by playing with irregular pulse and asymmetrical rhythms. Despite these attempts to free himself from time and direction, the Quatuor contains an idea of progress and organisation that renders this sensual music an extraordinarily accessible breath of oxygen for the soul.

The Roeland Hendrikx Ensemble commissioned the Belgian composer Harold Noben to write a work that could be programmed alongside Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps.