MUSIC

Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2022
7:30 PM

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center
70 Lincoln Center Plaza, Upper West Side, Manhattan

$34-$74
TICKETS + INFORMATION

Sure, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time has one of the best backstories in European classical music: composed in a Nazi prison camp, scored for the combination of instruments whose players the composer happened to know among his fellow inmates. But what’s key here is that this piece is one of the best things in all of music: haunting, transporting, evocative — and sounding like absolutely nothing else; a moving statement of faith even if you don’t share that faith, fully conveying the mystery that absolute faith invokes. Also on the program are Stravinsky’s delightful Suite Italienne, Neoclassicism at its sunniest, and the first of Brahms’s two Clarinet Sonatas, not the kind of thing we List here — but which can only be described as supernal.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: Delighful Cuisine Bourgeois at neighborhood standby La Boite en Bois.