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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
Pillars of Society

Production: Pillars of Society
Text: Henrik Ibsen
Director: Thys Heydenrych

Venue: Scaena theatre

Dates and times:
17 March 2010 19h30
18 March 2010 19h30
19 March 2010 19h30

Bookings: Computicket (Mimosa Mall and Checkers)

Bookings for block bookings of 10 or more people can be done with Thys Heydenrych (072 235 3191)


Pillars of Society is seen as one of Henrik Ibsen’s inferior plays, but it does show his concern for social and moral problems. It is Ibsen’s first social drama and the plot of the play follows earlier conventions of play writing of the time. In Pillars of Society Ibsen devotes more attention to making the piece logically consistent than to rendering it psychologically true.

Karsten Bernick is at the height of his career with interests in shipping and shipbuilding in a long-established family firm. The richest, most powerful and respected citizen of the community, he is held up as the model of an ideal husband and devoted father. In short, a worthy pillar of society. He is now backing a railway line which is his most ambitious project yet. The railway line will connect the town to the main line and open a fertile valley which he has been secretly buying up. But he began his career with a terrible lie.

As his new project is in the planning stage his past explodes on him. Johan Tønnesen, his wife"s younger brother comes back from America with his half-sister Lona, who once loved and was loved by Bernick. Johan left town 15 years ago to take the blame for Bernick, who was having an affair and was nearly caught with an actress. It was also rumoured that Johan stole money from the Bernicks, but there was no money to take since at the time the Bernick firm had been almost bankrupt.

It was for just this reason that Bernick rejected Lona, and married her sister Betty for money, so that he could rebuild the family business. In the years since Johan left, the town built ever greater rumours of his wickedness, helped by Bernick"s diligent refusal to give any indication of the truth.

This mixture only needs a spark to explode and it gets one when Johan Tønnesen falls in love with Dina Dorf, the young girl who is the daughter of the actress involved in the scandal of 15 years ago and who now lives as a charity case in the Bernick household.

The final line of the play embodies Ibsen’s main theme: The “Pillars of Society” are Truth and Freedom, not any one individual.

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