2 performances
2PM matinee + 7PM evening
Violin
Cello
Piano
Featuring PULL
A site-responsive performance centered on Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, presented inside the Lakewood Cemetery Chapel.
The Program
Our program places the quartet within a larger contemporary frame, extending its emotional and spiritual world through electronic sound and a performance by PULL.
The evening is structured as an experience rather than a standard recital — one that holds space for the work beyond the concert format, engaging its core ideas of harmonic stasis, eternity, and the suspension of time.
The program emphasizes lineage: the quartet as a spiritual ancestor to contemporary sound practices.
Messiaen composed and premiered Quartet for the End of Time while imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. The work embodies a sense of suspended time shaped by conditions of occupation and confinement.
Amid the accelerated unraveling of a world that advocates peace, we find ourselves as a species suspended in darkness.
Around the dome of the Lakewood Cemetery Chapel are the words, “Until the day break and the shadows flee away.” These words, from the Song of Solomon, remind us that in suspended time, we must find a way to endure the darkness while waiting for dawn.
Just as Messiaen finds moments of ethereal harmony within the quartet, the Chapel’s mosaic reminds us that even in a city (and a world) rattled by darkness, fear, and uncertainty, beauty and the sublime endure.
Join us at the intersection of a historic work, a historic place, and this moment in time.