Lucid Culture

Tashi were one of the first classical groups of the 70s to achieve rockstar status, and in those days they played it for all it was worth, dressing casually onstage, deliberately attracting younger audiences and pioneering all kinds of new music. Sunday at Town Hall, the quartet – pianist Peter Serkin, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, cellist Fred Sherry and violinist Ida Kafavian – reminded why they achieved such popularity, and proved none the worse for a 35-year hiatus between gigs together: in fact, their performance was one of the landmark musical events of 2008. Tashi first came together specifically to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, so it was particularly appropriate that they’d reunite this year for the Messiaen centenary.

They opened with two Renaissance works “recomposed” for them by contemporary composer Charles Wuorinen: Ave Maria, Virgo Serena by Josquin des Prez and Christes Crosse by Thomas Morley. The melodies were nothing special, generic pre-baroque call-and-response, but the textures of the instruments, particularly the clarinet and piano, were fascinating: such arrangements did not exist in early music. The next work was a striking departure, Toru Takemitsu’s Quatrain II, another piece written especially for the group, and highly influenced by Messiaen as well as Mingus. A strangely captivating, mysterious work punctuated by jarring percussive strokes and some spectacularly impressive, shakuhachi-esque, deep tones from Stoltzman, it boldly foreshadowed what was to come.

After an intermission, Tashi played the piece which had served as their original impetus, the terrifying, rivetingly intense Quartet for the End of Time. Composed in a Nazi POW camp, Messiaen wrote it for piano, clarinet, cello and violin out of necessity: those were the instruments that he and his three fellow musicians in the camp happened to play. Each of the eight sections of the suite has a liturgical title (Messiaen was a devout Catholic), but it’s essentially a cry out for rescue, as well as a fiercely victorious, vindictive response to imprisonment under the Nazis. This pantheonic but under-performed work (there aren’t many working quartets around to play it) was Tashi’s signature piece, as much a show-stopper tonight as it reputedly was three and a half decades ago. When Stoltzman - the Manny Ramirez of the clarinet – launched into a long, laborous solo passage, the anguish and longing was absolutely visceral. Serkin was nothing short of extraordinary: one of the world’s elite pianists, his touch on the keyboard was astonishing, evincing the subtlest dynamics with minutely differing amounts of sustain creating an effect that was practically vibrato. Kafavian and Sherry kept the embers of hope glowing with their eerie washes of sound.

The group shone most brightly on Messiaen’s two long, stately yet unpredictable crescendos, the first a melody familiar to rock audiences from King Crimson’s Starless and Bible Black (Robert Fripp a Messiaen fan? Who knew?). As the piece wound up, Kafavian’s sudden, violent cadenza tore through whatever was left of the Nazi shackles as Serkin gradually brought his eerily glimmering chords down to pianissimo at the end. After what seemed thirty seconds of absolute silence, the audience exploded in applause, calling the musicians back for three standing ovations and probably hoping for more. But anything else would have been anticlimactic. Let’s hope that this isn’t the last time the group reunites. Athough if this is it for Tashi, they  couldn’t have gone out on a more powerful note.