Digital Premiere: Quartet for the End of Time
Tuesday, April 20, 7 p.m.
Filmed at The Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing
Alan Gilbert, violin
Carter Brey, cello
Anthony McGill, clarinet
Inon Barnatan, piano
New York Philharmonic’s principal players Carter Brey and Anthony McGill are joined by pianist Inon Barnatan and former New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert for a nuanced and heart-wrenching performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Inspired by texts from the Book of Revelation, the work was composed during Messiaen’s internment in a German prisoner-of-war camp and was first performed by and for fellow prisoners in 1941. At this moment in time, following a year of pandemic and loss, the composition is a testament to the resilience of art and artists. The New Yorker has called the work “the most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century,” and the solemnity and intensity of this performance is amplified by the setting of The Met’s Temple of Dendur. This performance was originally presented on March 13, 2016, in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic.
This digital premiere is part of Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Hope online festival.
MetLiveArts Digital Premieres are free to stream and are available on The Met's website, YouTube channel, and Facebook. Videos will remain online and available to watch indefinitely. Images are available upon request.
Ongoing:
Matthew Evan Taylor: Postcards to The Met, a MetLiveArts commission in collaboration with Metropolis Ensemble, launched this spring, in March 2021. Composer and solo saxophonist Matthew Evan Taylor with Metropolis Ensemble and RAJAS, the South Asian jazz collective led by mridangam artist Rajna Swaminathan, provide a glimpse into Taylor's creative process through a 12-part series released exclusively on The Met’s IGTV. The musicians exchange musical concepts remotely, and these will become the creative inspiration for Taylor’s evening-length piece Life Returns, presented at The Met in spring 2022.
Each month on The Met’s IGTV a new video will share how Life Returns is being composed collaboratively across the globe, incorporating African American, South Indian, and Western European musicians and musical practices.
Previous MetLiveArts Digital Premieres:
Cadence: The Sounds of Justice, The Sounds of a Movement (digital premiere: Mar. 9, 2020)
Leila Josefowicz at The Met (digital premiere: Feb. 16, 2020)
They Will Take My Island(digital premiere: Jan. 26, 2021)
Handel and Haydn Society: Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 (digital premiere: Dec. 15, 2020; live: Apr. 8, 2017)
Seasons: A Song Cycle for Guitar Quartet(digital premiere: Dec. 1, 2020; live: Apr. 10, 2011)
Rosanne Cash and A. M. Homes: Eye of the Collector (digital premiere: Nov. 17, 2020)
John Holiday: Hold On! Freedom Is Coming!(digital premiere: Oct. 27, 2020)
Lee Mingwei and Bill T. Jones: Our Labyrinth(live digital premiere: Sep. 16, 23, and 30, 2020)
Nativity Reconsidered: El Nino(digital premiere: Aug. 8, 2020; live: Dec. 21, 2018)
Nrityagram: Samhāra Revisited (digital premiere: Jul. 18, 2020; live: Oct. 27 and 28, 2018)
The Ninth Hour: The Beowulf Story(digital premiere: Jun. 27, 2020; live: Jun. 28, 2019)
Thapelo Masita at The Met Cloisters (digital premiere: Jun. 21, 2020)
Silas Farley: Songs from the Spirit (digital premiere: Jun. 6, 2020; live: Mar. 8, 2020)
Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi: there is no Other (digital premiere: May 16, 2020; live: Oct. 4, 2019)
Baaba Maal: Songs of the Sahel (digital premiere: May 1, 2020; live: Mar. 9, 2020)
Black Rock Coalition: History of Our Future (digital premiere: Apr. 25, 2020; live: Sep. 7, 2019)
The Mother of Us All: An Opera by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson (digital premiere: Apr. 3, 2020; live: Feb. 8, 2020)
Program Credits:
The Digital Premiere of Quartet for the End of Time is made possible by through the Adrienne Arsht Fund for Resilience through Art and is presented as part of Carnegie Hall’s online festival Voices of Hope.
Matthew Evan Taylor: Postcards to The Met is made possible by the Adrienne Arsht Fund for Resilience through Art.
About MetLiveArts:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Live Arts commissions and presents new works of performance: music, words, movement, sound, and related hybrids. This singular, artistically rigorous body of work furthers The Met’s commitment to living artists, deepens connections between audiences and works of art, and introduces untested modes of performance. The department generates new scholarship and brings renewed relevance to historical art by putting it in conversation with contemporary performance. Live Arts produces the most expansive season of new and large-scale works in any museum-based performance series in the United States.
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April 9, 2021
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