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Every two years the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival brings dozens of outstanding performers to West Michigan for solo and ensemble performances, at venues widely dispersed around the festival's Kalamazoo home. In 2008, nearly a hundred events were held in Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Zeeland, Battle Creek, St. Joseph, Benton Harbor, and Three Rivers during the festival's three weeks. The spotlight is always on classical music, but there is room for crossover artists such as jazz/pop/classical singer Audra McDonald, and on one evening bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs and pop singer-songwriter Bruce Hornsby shared the stage. An extensive jazz program highlighted piano trios and jazz combos built around piano, keyboard, or organ.
The very last concert of this year's festival was held in Dalton Recital Hall at Western Michigan University on May 13. For this occasion Mitsuko Uchida, one of the giants of her generation, gathered together several younger players whose professional development she has assisted through the Borletti-Buitoni Trust to offer a wide-ranging program of chamber music from the 19th and 20th century. Welsh pianist Llyr Williams opened with a somber piece in two movements by Liszt, in which the one of the piano's leading pyrotechnicians imagined a Venice funeral procession for his dying friend Richard Wagner.
Then Williams was joined by violinist Soovin Kim and clarinetist Martin Fröst in Bela Bartok's "Contrasts," a virtuoso showpiece written as a commission for Benny Goodman. When the same program was repeated a week later in a recital space at Carnegie Hall, New York Times reviewer Bernard Holland called attention both to the "virtuoso turns" written especially for Goodman and to the "busy survey of Hungarian folk music" that enlivens the piece's three movements. Holland did not even attempt to describe the Messiaen quartet that followed, for, he said, "I have run out of adjectives and images to describe this great piece." [1]
The "Quartet for the End of Time" is one of the most remarkable compositions ever to emerge from the chaos of war. Written in a German prison camp, it received its premiere in January 1941 in an unheated barracks before 300 guards and fellow prisoners. For this portion of the program at Kalamazoo, Uchida replaced her younger colleague at the piano, and cellist Christian Poltéra joined the ensemble. [2]
The quartet is a bundle of contradictions and implausibilities, beginning with the odd addition of a clarinet to the violin, cello, and piano of a conventional string trio. One movement, the "Abyss of the Birds," is performed by unaccompanied clarinet, but the clarinet is silent for the last two movements. Indeed, only half of the eight movements in this "quartet" employ all four instruments, and even within those movements there are long soliloquies.
The second movement, "Vocalise: for the angel who announces the end of time," begins and ends in a furious driving rhythm, but between these bookends lies a meditative exploration of what the composer described as "sweet cascades of blue-orange chords." The lines traced out by the three instruments sometimes relate closely to each other or to the piano part, and there are intricate patterns of inversion and prolongation; but at other times they seem to fly past each other without even a nod of greeting.
The angel from whom Messiaen took his inspiration appears in Revelation 10, standing with one foot on the land and the other on the sea, shaking heaven and earth with a voice like a lion's roar. And the angel announces—in Messiaen's Bible—that "il n'y aurait plus de temps" ("there will be no more time"). This translation gives a mistaken impression, which is corrected in the 1999 Bible du Semour: "désormais, il n'y aurait plus de délai" ("henceforth there shall be no more delay"). But for Messiaen, clearly, it was time itself whose end is announced in this apocalyptic vision.
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