OLIVIER MESSIAEN Quartet for the End of Time Trio Wanderer & Pascal Moraguès

‘And the angel . . . sware . . . that there should be Time no longer’: these words from the Book of Revelation inspired the conception of this famous quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet – the instruments played by the musicians who were Messiaen’s fellow captives in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. Created in exceptionally testing conditions, it sums up the composer’s experiments and innovations, notably rhythmic. Whether augmented, diminished, regular, irregular or non-retrogradable, these rhythms opened wide the gates to a new music, and earned the quartet its place among the supreme masterworks.