The Ragged Music Festival (the brainchild of the two young Russian pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy) reaches a deeply affecting apotheosis with a star-studded performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Messiaen composed this gripping plea for peace in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he was interned in June 1940. The music of Alfred Schnittke and of Morton Feldman, master of silence, is likewise connected to death and to the inexorable passage of time in human life. HIIIT performs Schnittke’s Lebenslauf in collaboration with Kolesnikov.
Messiaen’s famous quartet is a religiously inspired vision in which an angel brings time to a standstill. But it is also a monument to life, resonating with imitations of birdsong and warm harmonies. That same warmth, and the underlying melancholy for all that makes the world beautiful, is also present in the wondrously consoling Andante from Schubert’s most famous piano trio. With Piano Phase, Rosas and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker pay homage to the American minimalist Steve Reich.