During the concert featuring excellent instrumentalists: Annelien Van Wauwe, Radosław Pujanek, Benedict Klöckner and José Gallard, two quite exceptional quartets by Zygmunt Krauze and Olivier Messiaen will be heard. Works related to deep personal experiences occupy a special place in the biographies of both composers and in the entire history of music.

Quatuor pour la naissance for clarinet, violin, cello and piano was created in special circumstances – its composition was inspired by the birth of Zygmunt Krauze’s son. The premiere of the work, characterized by various expressive phrases and Romantic poetics, took place in 1985 in Paris. Since then, in has frequently appeared in the repertoire alongside Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, created over forty years before Krauze’s piece.

Quatuor pour la fin du temps is one of the greatest musical works of the 20th century, and at the same time one of Messiaen’s most important compositional achievements. The artist composed the quartet in the winter of 1940 and 1941, while being imprisoned in the German Stalag VIII A camp in Görlitz. He composed the piece mainly for himself and his fellow prisoners who could play the violin, cello and clarinet. The composition, consisting of eight movements, was first premiered on 15 January 1941 in one of the stalag barracks, and was heard by about 400 interned prisoners of war. The score of the work, kept in a mystical style, contains an inscription of the author himself, who signed it with the words: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer.’” Music critic Alex Ross described the work as follows: “Contemporary music is sometimes so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder when they hear it. Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with its grandly singing lines and gently ringing chords, stops time with each performance.”