Tuscany abounds with fabulous settings for concerts. Sometimes these locations may be ancient abbeys or baroque palace gardens. Sometimes they may be in the natural amphitheatre of mountains such as the rifugio Rossi just below the Pania Della Croce in the Apuan Alps.

Pieve a Elici is one such wonderful location. The ancient Romanesque church dedicated to Saint Pantaleon (one of the fourteen mediaeval helpers against the Black Death) is situated on one of the last outcrops of the Apuans and commands a stunning view over Lake Massaciuccoli and the Tyrhennian Sea.

The church dates back to the eleventh century and the reason why it’s called ‘a Elici’ derives from the ‘leccio’, or ilex trees that abound in the area. The interior consists of a nave and two aisles and a single apse; the campanile was originally a watch-tower.

The pieve contains some lovely artworks. There’s a marble triptych by Ticcomani, a local fifteenth century sculptor who also carved the  holy water stoup. The fresco of the Virgin and child is of the fourteenth century.

The site was originally occupied by a castle, of which traces remain, and in the courtyard separating the parish priest’s lodging and the church there’s a square well dating back to Roman times by which I gained a useful viewing point for the evening’s event.

The Pieve is placed on a large lawn and is not surrounded by any houses. This is because a pieve acted as a hub for all the surrounding villages and would  be the only religious building where baptisms could take place. Its location, therefore, would be free from association with any particular settlement.

We’ve visited the pieve on previous occasions for the lovely chamber music concerts organised by the Associazione Musicale Lucchese under the aegis of Egisto Matteucci.

In 2015 the Cremona quartet played Schubert and Mozart: see

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/heavenly-music-in-a-heavenly-place/

In 2016 we attended a Schubert trio recital described in my post at:

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/sublime-schubert-at-pieve-a-elici/composed in a

Pieve a Elici has, indeed, become part of our annual calendar of unmissable music events.

This year we were treated to one of the twentieth century’s chamber music masterpieces, Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, composed in a concentration camp near Gorlitz ,Silesia in 1940. It’s a work I’ve played countless times on my old vinyl recording with artistes Michel Béroff, Gervase de Peyer, Erich Gruenberg and William Pleeth ‎. In fact, I’m hearing that recording at this moment and it is still a very valid performance.

There are various apocryphal stories about the quartet and here I want to put some facts straight.

1. There were just 300 people at the first performance, not 5000.
2. The ‘louanges’ (lauds) were already composed in the 1930’s.
3. The instruments were not that decrepit and the cello did have all its strings, not just three as often stated. It’s true, however that the piano keys stuck from time to time. (May it be appropriate to have an authentic – or historically informed – performance of this work with such a piano perhaps?)
4. A camp assistant, Carl-Albert Brüll, who supplied Messiaen with score-writing paper and without whose help the first performance would certainly never have taken place, was indeed rebuffed by Messiaen when he visited the composer after the war. (Perhaps Messiaen didn’t want to be reminded of the terrible hardships of the concentration camp?). Much later, however, Messiaen repented of his behaviour and sent an invitation to Brüll. Unfortunately it arrived the day after Brüll had been mown down by a car and killed (in 1989).
5. Gorlitz concentration camp exists in a few mouldering bits of concrete. It was never an extermination camp but used for prisoners-of-war including Brits and even Italians. It is now a European Union cultural centre with regular art exhibitions.
6. Gorlitz itself is a very beautiful town mercifully saved from the ravages of war. Indeed, it’s often used for costume-drama  film settings. Despite the fact that Gorlitz was divided by the Oder-Neisse line after 1945 into Polish and German areas it is now, thanks to both countries being part of the Schengen agreement, able to be visited without national barriers, 

One thing is certain, however: the first performance was well-publicised in the camp and was a great success which it has remained ever since.

In the performance we attended the players were as follows:

Mario Brunello (cello), Marco Rizzi (violin), Gabriele Nirabassi (clarinet) and Andrea Lucchesini (piano).

As in the original first performance the concert took place in the open air. This was not because of lack of accommodation (although the audience was very extensive) but because, with the ‘Lucifer’ African bubble giving Italy temperatures ten degrees above normal for this time of year, the Pieve’s interior would have been unbearably hot.

I reminded myself that the original performance took place in a temperature of minus 15 centigrade in the freezing Silesian winter.

The Elici performance was excellent, although the acoustics did suffer a little as a result of the outside location. For example, in the ‘louanges’ the pulsating piano chords did tend to swamp the clear lines of the solo string players. In the movements where all the instruments play together, however, the balance was good.

The clarinettist had a strange habit of suddenly getting off his chair. At first I thought he was going to walk off but then I realised that Nirabassi was moving around – jazz-like – to extract the most effective sound dynamics from his instrument.

The performance was introduced by writer and radio presenter Gabriella Caramore who gave the audience a long (for non-Italian listeners, unbearably over-long..) reflection on the apocalypse. As Messiaen quoted from the Bible:

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire … and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth…. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever … that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished…

Here are the sections of this mind-expanding work.

1. Liturgie De Cristal
2. Vocalise, Pour L’Ange Qui Annonce La Fin Du Temps
3. Abîme Des Oiseaux
4. Intermède
5. Louange À L’Eternité De Jésus
6. Danse De La Fureur, Pour Les Sept Trompettes
7. Fouillis D’Arcs-En-Ciel, Pour L’Ange Qui Annonce La Fin Du Temps
8. Louange À L’Immortalité De Jésus

It’s significant that this is one of the first works in which Messiaen uses bird-song. He was also an expert ornithologist and extensively studied avian sounds. We were lucky enough to be part of the audience when the composer’s opera Saint Francoise d’Assisi was performed in a non-staged setting at the Royal Festival Hall in 1988 for the composer’s birthday with the great man himself present.

Since Saint Francis famously preached to the birds the opera gave Messiaen every opportunity to display his instrumental talent in bird song imitation. Frankly I still think it was a bit of a cheek for Saint Francis to have preached to the birds. Birds have a lot more to teach us in my opinion and I expressed my feelings about this in the following poem:

SAINT FRANCIS

Preaching to the birds

you showed a strange, surpassing presumption,

uncommonly modest man.

What in creation could you teach them

they did not know already?

Singing lessons were out:

there are more perfect notes in the sky

than in all our chants and manuscripts,

sonatas, cantatas, songs of the earth.

Clearly, flying lessons too seemed out of place

when hospitals are filled with

once-hand-gliding paraplegics

descended from Icarus.

And finding one’s direction in life

when we still don’t know our own home

and albatross can locate the nesting space

among a billion square miles

year in year out

with instinct’s love-infinity;

when avian gyroscopic navigation

– live reckoning –

adds on the index yet another

computer-unsolved enigma.

And what of the discovering of worlds,

revelation of new lands

and smell of alien flowers?

Geese flew the Americas so many spans before

a Genoese sea-captain

and the Antarctic has been tern’s summer hideaway

since the Triassic and dinosaur cousins.

So what did you tell them?

Of the praise of God and his works,

of his love for the creatures of the air

(for the flesh of man is not

the flesh of birds)

when a pelican’s upbringing is a parable of gospel-light?

When the finger-cast seed grows into the greatest of herbs

that rooks might lodge in its branches.

When petrels are breaths of God’s providence:

The birds have their nests but the son of man…

Nowhere to lay down your head?

Is that it? Some sort of pre-memorial regret,

some little envious demon

spoiling hard rock cushion

among crucified trees

in the forests of your night?

And then … and then

are not two sparrows sold for a farthing

and none are forgotten before God,

neither shall one fall without His knowledge?

Despite your dispensation of the family wealth

naked in towered city square

before ermine and gold,

the council chamber

and your discarded courtesan

did you not insanely fear you’d be forgotten

or that you would fall and He

would not notice it?

For wheresoever the carcass is

there will the eagles be gathered together.

PS There are further concerts in this unmissable season at Pieve a Elici. They are listed on the site at:

http://www.associazionemusicalelucchese.it/

Finally, here are some snippets from the evening’s performance: