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ALBUQUERQUE CHAMBER SOLOISTS SEASON FINALE

PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW START TIME OF 2:00 PM!

Albuquerque Chamber Soloists closes its 2022-23 season with two magnificent 20th-century works for piano, violin, clarinet, and viola. Our performers will be pianist Judith Gordon, violinist Megan Holland, cellist James Holland, and guest clarinetist Laura Grantier, former Principal Clarinetist of the US Navy Band and current professor of clarinet at the University of Utah.

Leading off the program is the Quartet by Peter Schickele, composed between 1979 and 1982. If his name rings a bell, that's because he is best known as the mastermind behind the fictional 21st Bach son, PDQ Bach. When not in satirical PDQ mode, Schickele is a Juilliard-trained composer, educator and radio host. His music draws from an eclectic range of sources - jazz and Celtic elements as well as more traditional classical approaches. This quartet is a fine example of his work, alternating between high-spirited virtuosity and nostalgic lyricism.

The story behind Olivier Messiaen's creation of his Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) is the stuff of legend. Written in 1940 and premiered in January of 1941 in the confines of a German POW camp, it is a piece that truly transcends the circumstances of its composition. A sympathetic guard secretly provided Messiaen paper and a tiny pencil to write the 8-movement work. It is a work of intense religious devotion, taking a passage from the 10th chapter of the Book of Revelation and alternating between agitated music depicting scenes from the apocalypse and slow, ecstatic contemplations of the immortality and eternity of Christ.