Voices of apocalypse

Brett DEAN (b 1961): Demons for solo flute (2004)

George CRUMB (b 1929): Black Angels: 13 Images from the Dark Land, for electric string quartet (1970)

Olivier MESSIAEN (1908-1992): Quartet for the End of Time for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (1941) – 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth

Music can be, and often is, blissfully charming; but it can also look into the abyss and evoke malevolence and chaos. The emotional progress of large-scale nineteenth and early twentieth century symphonies is quite often from miasmic gloom to sunlit exultation. A similar trajectory governs this program. It begins with a teeming array of musical Demons, as assembled by a brilliant Australian musician, Brett Dean, who has returned from years spent playing in one of the world’s leading orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic, to take his place in the front rank of our composers. Dean sets his demons whirring by creating fiendish difficulties of performance in a work for solo flute, though the player audibly exorcises these demons by solving the piece’s technical problems and turning them into a triumphant entertainment. George Crumb, whose Voice of the Whale has been enlisted in the campaign to stop whaling, is poetic and comprehensive in facing into the heart of darkness in his Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, a title worthy of Tolkien’s Mordor and presented with lowered lights and a strong sense of music theatre. It is left to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time to encompass a final progress from stricken, lonely desolation and through inexorable power to a slow, infinitely patient climb towards sublimity. Its musical rendering of apocalyptic scenes and images is a masterpiece of instrumental writing, written during the composer’s internment in a German prison camp and now recognised as one of the finest achievements of a major composer whose 100th anniversary will be celebrated next year.