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Quartet For The End Of Time
2018-10-25

Quartet For The End Of Time

By Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992)

25 October 2018

Odeion

19:30

“THE IDEA OF THE END OF TIME AS THE END OF PAST AND FUTURE AND THE BEGINNING OF ETERNITY”

Anmari van der Westhuizen and Samson Diamond (members of the renowned Odeion String Quartet), will join with the award-winning soloists Grethe Nöthling and Danrè Strydom to perform one of the 20th century’s most compelling chamber music works, Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. These musicians need no introduction to Bloemfontein audiences.

Composed while he was a prisoner of war, Messiaen's Quartet has continually wowed audiences since its creation. The oppressive conditions within which the work was conceived - set against the backdrop of wartime conditions in Nazi Germany - contribute to the work’s inner narrative. In this unsettling time of global political and social uncertainty, we aim to reframe this work from the past in order to contemplate the present. Music woven together with other art forms elicit and explain a range of emotions where words often fail.

A selection of striking WWII photos will be projected behind the musicians - reflecting the theme and history of the composition.

About the composition
Olivier Messiaen (1908 - 92)
Quatour pour le fin du temps (1940 - 41)

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was written in perhaps the most incongruous spot any great score has been composed in: an unheated barrack in Stalag VIII-A, a German prisoner-of-war camp, during the second winter of World War 2. Messiaen wrote this mystical quartet for the instruments available in the camp (clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) in a setting that is arguably among the least conducive for creative work.

The quartet is Messiaen's musical depiction of and rumination on Revelation 10:1-7, which the composer included as a heading to the score:

“I saw a mighty angel descending from heaven, clad in mist, having around his head a rainbow. His face was like the sun, his feet like pillars of fire. He placed his right foot on the sea, his left on the earth, and standing thus on the sea and the earth, he lifted his hand toward heaven and swore by Him who liveth forever and ever, saying: "There shall be time no longer, but at the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel the mystery of God shall be consummated."

ADMISSION

  • R120 (adults)
  • *R80 (pensioners)
  • *R70 (UFS staff)
  • *R50 (students, learners and block bookings of 10+)

Tickets available at Computicket or online at http://online.computicket.com/web/

*Please note that tickets for pensioners, students, learners and UFS staff can only be purchased at a Computicket outlet (Shoprite Checkers) or at the doors since a valid card or ID has to be presented to qualify for the above-mentioned discount.

ENQUIRIES
Ninette Pretorius (tel. 051 401 2504)


Back
Jacki McInnes exhibition

DE MAGNETE

at the Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery from 23 August - 14 September.

Gallery hours: Mon - Fri 08:30 - 16:30.

The Earth's magnetic field strength was measured by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1835 and has been repeatedly measured since then, showing a relative decay of about 10% over the last 150 years.

It is a supreme irony that we live in a contemporary scenario in which global culture, predicated on the notion of progress, is in fact, entirely based on the relentless destruction of nature. McInnes’ solo exhibition de Magnete interrogates the contradictions inherent in present-day human thought and behaviour, especially with respect to the disconnect between our material aspirations and their inevitable effect on our planet and ultimate future.

Key areas of interest relate to the forces of attraction and repulsion and, secondarily, to the speed at which we hurtle resolutely on our chosen trajectory into an uncertain future. McInnes explores the concept of ‘anomie’ – a term referring to the loss of personal or societal norms of behaviour. The word was popularised by French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his influential book Suicide (1897). Durkheim was of the opinion that anomie arises as a result of a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from a lack of a social ethic, which acts to produce moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

A leit motif of the effect exerted by the magnetic field runs through the work speaking to the concepts of the loss of our societal moral compass and to the binary opposing forces to which we are subjected: nature on nature; man on nature; man on man, and inevitably, nature on man.

 

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