Quartet For The End Of Time.

" In my dreams, I hear and see ordered chords and melodies, known colors and shapes; then, after this transitional stage, I pass through the unreal and suffer, with ecstasy, a tournament; a roundabout compenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These swords of fire, this blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: there is the tangle, there are the rainbows!"

In Greyfriars Kirk with Tessa for a performance of Olivier Messiaen's wartime composition for clarinet, violin, cello and piano.

This remarkable and intimate score was written in 1940 after the French composer was imprisoned in the German POE camp Stalag VIII-A after a sympathic guard supplied him with paper, pencil and the instruments with which to practice and perform. The piece, inspired bythe Biblical Book of Revelation, found its first performance outside and in the rain in January 1941, attended by an audience of guards and fellow inmates.