A Precious Recording, and a Tashi Reunion
Any record collector worth his salt possesses a copy of the RCA pressing of Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" by the chamber group Tashi. The foursome celebrated its 34th reunion on Sunday with a free concert at Town Hall.
I was born too early to have lost my virginity to this particular recording, but for many from the intellectual wing of the late hippie movement, the LP holds significant memories. The record jacket features pictures of a hirsute Tashi (Peter Serkin, piano, Ida Kavafian, violin, Richard Stoltzman, clarinet, and Fred Sherry, cello) adorned in robes. It was issued at roughly the same period as the Utah Symphony's "Mahler Is Heavy" album.
The word Tashi itself is part of a Tibetan Buddhist phrase that translates as "auspicious symbols of good fortune." The issuance of this powerful work of religious ecstasy with Asian philosophical iconography on its cover was part of a campaign to marginalize Messiaen's Catholicism in subservience to a countercultural marketing technique.
Sunday's concert had the feel of a gathering of the tribes at the 20th farewell appearance of a Paleolithic rock group. Judging from this reading, however, Tashi has not lost too much along the way.
The performance of the quartet was really quite good, even though some of the fire of the original recording was missing in action. Messiaen wrote this piece in 1941 while a prisoner of war, and so the instrumentation was dictated by his available mates, one of whom, clarinetist Henri Akoka, was Jewish, although this was kept secret. The composer fashioned three of the eight movements as solos for his companions, and these were by and large handled with expertise by the current Tashi players.
Mr. Stoltzman was a little ragged in spots, but did convey the mystery of his movement, titled "Abyss of the Birds." Mr. Sherry was sailing along through one of the most beautiful movements in all of 20th-century music, "Praise to the Eternity of Jesus," with Mr. Serkin providing sensitive chordal underpinnings. But the cellist ran aground at the conclusion, unable to sustain the last note, the elongation of which became somewhat of a sonic nightmare, as if the cello itself was gasping for breath. Ms. Kavafian was superb in her concluding solo, leaving listeners with a warm feeling — bear in mind that for the Catholic Messiaen, the end of time was a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The other half of the program consisted of pieces written for Tashi. When Anton Webern arranged the "Ricercare" from Bach's "A Musical Offering," he took great pains to separate individual sounds by timbre, creating a sonic universe featuring great spaces. Charles Wuorinen adopted a similar technique when arranging "Ave Maria ...Virgo Serena" by Josquin des Prez and the fascinatingly multirhythmic "Christes Crosse" by late medievalist Thomas Morley. Tashi did a fine job of clear individual note definition and handled the difficult cross rhythms with apparent ease.
Toru Takemitsu was also a composer who worked with Tashi. He fashioned a piece for quartet and orchestra titled "Quatrain" after meeting with Messiaen. Tashi was the original set of soloists. Later, Takemitsu took some of his previous ideas and developed a new piece, "Quatrain II," for Tashi alone. This was the work that they played this day, and they put it over with authority. Some very strange sounds and complex ideas emerge from the mind and ear of this still underappreciated composer. Maybe by the 70th reunion, Tashi will have converted many more loyal listeners to its cause.
