REVIEW: SummerFest Celebrates Messiaen’s Transcendent ‘Quartet for the End of Time’

There were no vacant seats at SummerFest’s Tuesday concert at The Conrad, and the most likely explanation was the presence of operatic soprano Renée Fleming on the program. Fleming gave a concert for the La Jolla Music Society in February of 2024, and a robust crowd also showed up for that performance.

On Tuesday Fleming sang Richard Strauss’s valedictory opus, the Four Last Songs, a short song cycle with orchestra. The focus of Tuesday’s program, however, was Olivier Messiaen’s 1941 Quartet for the End of Time. One of the preeminent works of the 20th century, this hour-long quartet for piano, clarinet, violin and cello charts Messiaen’s unique harmonic vocabulary and employs his favored non-retrogradable rhythms.

It is a challenging work that music historians love to cite and programmers are hesitant to offer. My records indicate that the last time it was given a complete professional performance locally was on a La Jolla SummerFest concert in 2016.

So SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan made a clever programming choice. Those who were eager to hear Fleming sing a few Strauss songs would need to first experience Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. In the quartet’s eight movements the composer illuminates a series of celestial apparitions portrayed in the book of Revelation—the last book of the Bible—that are imagined when the temporal realm ceases and God’s eternity is finally revealed.

With Barnatan at the piano, violinist Alan Gilbert, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, and clarinetist Ricardo Morales, this Quartet for the End of Time performance proved nothing less than transcendent.

In Messiaen’s opening movement, “The Crystal Liturgy,” he quotes awakening birdsong just before dawn as a symbol of a realm beyond time, portrayed by the four instruments with an avalanche of trilling motifs in their uppermost ranges. To portray the angel who announces the end of time, the Quartet’s second movement, Barnatan unleashed a brilliant declamation of complex, crashing piano chords, followed by a peaceful, prayer-like incantation by the two strings accompanied by muted piano motifs. Nicolas Altstaedt closed this section with a shimmering pianissimo cello line that evoked the sublime peace of eternity.

Clarinetist Ricardo Morales eloquently took flight—appropriately—in the third movement,  “The Abyss of Birds,” an exalted clarinet solo that starts quietly in the instrument’s lowest range and ascends after much mysterious searching to vibrant, high-pitched birdsong. Messiaen stated that he understood the abyss to be Time, and to him, birds represented the opposite of Time.

The terse, compact fourth movement, a trio without the piano, is built on a theme  outlined in brutal octaves. The  composer had written this trio before he even contemplated the Quartet, but he felt it provided the proper transition to the Quartet’s fifth movement, “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus,” another sumptuous, languid cello cantilena that Altstaedt floated effortlessly in his instrument’s highest range, supported by Barnatan’s insistent, discrete, repeated piano chords.

All four instruments fused spectacularly into the furious, angular dancing octave themes that careen through the sixth movement, “Dance of Fury.” In Messiaen’s penultimate movement, the announcing angel from the second movement returns on dulcet, ravishing cantilenas, first sounded by the cello, then extended by the violin, each garnished with what the composer describes as “clusters of rainbows” from the piano.

As if the composer ha failed to adequately laud Jesus in the fifth movement, his finale adds another hymn, “Praise to the Immortality of Jesus,” replete with ethereal themes offered with reverent finesse by violinist Alan Gilbert.

While it is not unusual to experience spiritual uplift while hearing and appreciating accomplished musical performance, the traversal of Philip Glass’s Etudes on SummerFest’s opening weekend and this performance of The Quartet for the End of Time elevated that spiritual journey to a significantly higher plane.    

On Tuesday’s SummerFest program, this meant that hearing Renée Fleming’s gracious account of the Richard Strauss Four Last Songs with a chamber orchestra conducted by Alan Gilbert seemed anticlimactic. Her adroit interpretation honored both Hermann Hesse’s poetry and the composer’s supple melodies, and, as she demonstrated in her most recent appearance at The Conrad, her upper range still exhibits the gleam that captivated opera audiences around the globe. But the strength of that upper range dissipates all too quickly in mid-range.

Even with an accompanying orchestra, the Strauss songs remain intimate and personal, although their texts allude to universal aspirations. But the scope of Messiaen’s quartet is nothing less than cosmic, and, as they say—that’s a hard act to follow.

This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society on August 5, 2025, at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center.