If for many British music students in the early 1960s, modern music ended with Bartók and the neo-classical Stravinsky, the two recordings on this CD disc helped to change all that.
Roger Nichols’s note goes on to relate: ‘The story behind the quartet has often been told: its composition in a wash-house in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia in 1940, its first performance on 15 January 1941 before an audience of 400 fellow prisoners with a piano whose keys kept sticking, and the audience’s response to the work’s life-affirming properties – “I was never listened to”, the composer said later, “with such attention and understanding”.’
The work treats of ‘the abolition of time itself, something infinitely mysterious and incomprehensible to most philosophers of time, from Plato to Bergson’.
In this great recording from 1968, Nichols singles out Gervase de Peyer as supremely equal to his starring role: ‘surely no clarinettist has yet matched his “désolé” tone and phrasing at the start of the third movement solo’.
The substantial coupling is the far less accessible Chronochromie, recorded in 1964 and written just four years earlier. This came about through a subvention from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and had the further benefit that Antal Dorati had conducted the work’s stormy Paris première in 1962. Here the BBC SO respond to the considerable challenges with playing of remarkable accuracy, energy and colour: as Nichols says, with repeated listening, the work’s difficulties become beauties.
Again, both works are newly transferred and remastered to ART standard at Abbey Road Studios.
“Béroff invests Messiaen's piano writing with subtlety, and displays an acute sensitivity to the exotic harmonies. With responsive support from the other performers, this is a moving interpretation of a classic.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2009 ****
