End of Time

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is unique among the Bay Area's new-music-focused ensembles in spending a fair amount of time outside the 21st or even 20th centuries. LCCE programs typically juxtapose new, 20th-century, and yet older works playable with a particular clutch of four or five instrumentalists, the instrumentarium changing from program to program as each of the ensemble's 12 players gets a lick in. So Monday's program in the Veterans Building's Green Room, featuring music for clarinet, violin, cello, and (in two of three pieces) piano, was typical of the ensemble's planning. Less typical was the identity of the oldest piece on the program: not something from the 18th or 19th centuries, but rather Olivier Messiaen's 1940-41 Quatuor pour la Fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time). In the event, the Messiaen, still bewildering after all these years, dominated but didn't quite overwhelm a tightly designed and compellingly played program.

Messiaen occupies a peculiar place in the contemporary music world. Judging by the caliber of his reputation, he would seem scandalously underperformed. But in a new-music economy that favors chamber works and shortish orchestral ones, Messiaen wrote precious few of either. The major works are dauntingly large pieces either for solo keyboard (piano or organ) or for enormous forces, pieces whose frequency of performance is harshly constrained by performers' (and audiences') stamina, budget, or both. So we get occasional blockbuster productions like San Francisco Opera's of Saint François d'Assise, and rare ventures like Christopher Taylor's into the solo piano Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus — and not much else. The one meaty chamber work we have is the Quatuor pour la Fin du temps, and that alone would guarantee it a reasonable number of performances. The piece's remarkable backstory — it was written in a German prisoner-of-war camp, the scoring dictated by the instruments of three other musicians also interned there — doesn't hurt, either. But the piece's real distinction is just that it sounds like nothing else on this earth. Come to the opening "Liturgie de Cristal" (Crystal liturgy) — all wandering piano chords and slithery cello-harmonic glissandi and bright clarinet trills and remote birdcalls picked out high up on the violin — with your ears full of common-currency music of the preceding decade, and your only reaction can be "What the hell? Where are we?"

Weird as Ever

On Monday night, despite sharing the program with the brand-spanking-new (Laurie San Martin's Objets trouvés, receiving its premiere) and the "difficult" (Elliott Carter's 1990 Con leggerezza pensosa), the Messiaen was as ineluctably weird as ever. The Left Coast players' performance was dazzling in its ensemble tautness and its single-mindedness, but it was human brilliance, tinged with toil and with strain. In the two marvelous string-and-piano paeans, the work's fifth and eighth movements, cellist Tanya Tomkins and violinist Anna Presler respectively sustained their agonizingly long lines heroically. The great song never broke, but you were constantly, movingly aware of the effort that it took; it was, as Messiaen must have meant it to be, an image of the human attempting to encompass the divine. In the third-movement "Abîme des Oiseaux" (Abyss of birds), by contrast, Jerome Simas' clarinet seemed scarcely embodied, let alone human. The sound was clear, splendidly liquid, agile, mysterious, remote. Simas began the movement's long-note crescendos so quietly that you first became aware of the pitch only to realize that it had already been sounding for some little time. As for pianist Eric Zivian, whose bright-toned playing showered fistfuls of glittering notes on the second and fifth movements, and whose slow, serene pulse underlay the fifth and eighth, he was, as ever, alert to the music's every gesture. (It would be fascinating to hear him tackle some of the solo piano music. I wonder if he has.) Messiaen often leaves the four instruments to their own separate paths, as in that opening movement, but when they're together, it's with a vengeance. Presler's, Tomkins', and Simas' taut, cheekily inflected performance of the fourth-movement "Intermèd" was scant preparation for the entire quartet's blistering performance of the sixth, "Danse de la Fureur, pour le sept trompettes" (Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets), another of those things calculated to knock the unwary listener into the middle of next week. Is there anything in music up to that point to prepare you for this movement — a wild, rhythmically outré, wickedly irregular unison line for all four instruments that lashes to and fro like a living thing, doubling and redoubling on itself, for a harrowing six minutes without respite? The Left Coast players held on for dear life, and so did we.

With Thoughtful Lightness

In the context of the Messiaen, the Carter opener for once seemed a bagatelle. As it probably should: Surely the right analogue for all those little Carter chamber works of the '80s and '90s is the piano bagatelles of Beethoven's late years, distillations of what had earlier been worked out at greater length and on a more forbidding scale. Con legerezza pensosa (With thoughtful lightness), for clarinet, violin, and cello, takes its title from a phrase of the writer Italo Calvino, but the phrase might have been designed as a subhead for the end of Carter's still-expanding worklist. (I suppose something written toward the beginning of the man's ninth decade qualifies as "late Carter," but at the rate the indefatigable centenarian is going, we may end up needing more than the customary three periods.) The piece is brief, poised, intermittently busy, and now and then whimsical, as in its droll disappearing act of an ending. The Left Coast performance was remarkable for the clarity of its gestures and the attention the players gave to its many sudden stillnesses — where the three lines came momentarily together for a long note, there was always a feeling of securely achieved repose. Laurie San Martin's Objets trouvés (Found objects) was commissioned by Left Coast as a companion piece to the Messiaen, and the composer (who performed the older work as clarinetist in her UC Berkeley student days) consciously worked elements of it into her own writing. Not that there is much in the way of audible quotation of material — the references I caught were mostly textural and, to a lesser degree, harmonic, and were resemblances rather than identities. The piece is in three movements, with elements of the second — a sort of vocalise for clarinet and then strings over slowly arpeggiated chords in the piano, the part of the work most immediately savoring of Messiaen — working their way into the finale, as well. The first movement has a thundering piano part confined mostly to the low register, and an urgent, wide-ranging unison string line, cut off suddenly at its height by a clarinet cadenza. The clarinet, indeed, takes center stage more often than in the Messiaen. The tumultuous opening of the finale even briefly suggests an accompanied recitative, with the clarinet as singer, though soon enough all four instruments are off vigorously pursuing their own material. Harmonically, San Martin's writing is open and forthright, with occasional glances France-ward (further back than Messiaen, sometimes — I was reminded in places of Milhaud or even Ravel). Throughout, the scoring seems natural and well-balanced, which is no mean trick with these instrumental forces. Despite the obvious example of the Messiaen, the less-obvious one of Hindemith's 1938 Quartet, and the onetime prominence of Tashi, the new-music clarinet/violin/cello/piano quartet formed in the early '70s precisely to play the Messiaen, this scoring has nothing like the currency of the "Pierrot ensemble" (which adds a flute) in new-music circles, and I imagine it's because the latter, pairing winds and strings, is simpler to score for. Objets trouvés shows that this needn't be so. (Tashi, as it happens, has just reunited to play — what else? — the Quatuor pour le Fin du temps in honor of the Messiaen centenary. Time to send someone a score?)