Guest pianist, Andrea Lam talks to us about Messiaen ahead of the first AE concert of 2025 and gives us a look into her preparation for the March 22 performance.
How do you prepare for a work like this? Can you share how the historical context of the work feeds into your approach and preparation?
Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is a piece I have always wanted to play. It is entirely unique and a remarkable masterpiece - transcendent, wondrous, inspiring, fierce, angry, intensely beautiful, rhythmic, timeless, sublime, full of love and pain - and has a profound effect on the listener. Its history is fascinating -Messiaen wrote the piece in a prisoner of war camp and it premiered on a brutally cold night in the camp. Messiaen’s reaching for the sublimely
spiritual in such a barren, inhuman landscape is so deeply powerful. My preparation for this work is much like my preparation for all music - learning the text as deeply as possible and reading as much as I can about the composer and the music. This is music that is especially moving when heard live and I am greatly looking forward to experiencing it with Dimity, Julian, and David.
Messiaen’s musical language is highly distinctive, shaped by his unique compositional systems and his experience of synaesthesia. What has your journey been like in learning and understanding his musical language?
The language is viscerally evocative. With Messiaen's music, I always love just playing through the chords slowly and hearing them. In other music, I often spend quite a bit of time analysing chords, but with Messiaen, I just play and listen, enjoying the colour and flavour and magic of every chord. It's like looking at reflected light. The language is so interesting - for example the prevalence of birds, pushing rhythms and the idea of pulse to the extremes, the completely unique combination of consonance and dissonance in his harmony, vibrant evocations of colour - all combined with a deep faith and spirituality. It's fascinating.
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