Memorable Solos in Messiaen’s ‘Quartet’

Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” has come a long way since the composer and three other prisoners of war gave the premiere under terrible conditions at Stalag VIII-A 59 years ago. Now one of the century’s formative classics, it has become a virtuoso vehicle for sleek, high-powered ensembles, such as the touring unit of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which made the piece the massive climax of its French program heard Sunday on the Coleman Concerts Series at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.

This is good news and bad news for a work that desperately needs an edge, a rooted subtext of terrors evaded, to anchor its otherworldly transcendence. Sunday the Interlude and the Dance of Fury seemed like glossy exercises in polymetric counting, all the granitic unevenness rounded into smoothly rolling hillocks of suave, placid sound.

But oh, those peerlessly time-defying solos. The work takes its textual imagery from the Book of Revelation, where an angel tells St. John of the day when time shall be no more. Messiaen suspends musical time in long, gentle waves of non-goal-oriented phrasing, self-regenerating loops of floating melody, played here with endlessly eloquent grace.

Clarinetist and Chamber Music Society artistic director David Shifrin plumbed the depths of the Abyss of the Birds with liquid warblings, woody swelling hoots and resolutely questing lines of musical inquiry. Violinist Ida Kavafian and cellist Peter Wiley spun out the angelic paeans with infinite, assured tenderness, and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott provided the heavenly tolling, more a beckoning forward than an accompanying prop.

In New York, Hindemith and Krenek joined Messiaen. On the road, it is duo sonatas from Poulenc and Ravel--earthier stuff reminding us that some French composers value concision, rationality and wit.

Poulenc’s lyrical Clarinet Sonata from 1962 gave Shifrin ample opportunity to impress with agility, flair and masterly control of breath and tone. It was also generous to McDermott, who demonstrated virtues of sassy rhythm and crystalline textures and passage work.

Ravel’s much more acerbic Sonata for Violin and Cello brought Kavafian and Wiley together on obviously congenial terrain, some under-motivated dawdling in the slow movement excepted. The pair argued its interactively independent positions with intense concentration on linear logic, readily enlivened with expressive fire.