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By Jill Yesko , University Relations
Contact (336) 334-3890
Posted:3-28-07
GREENSBORO, N.C. – A concert featuring music composed and first performed by concentration camp prisoners will be presented on Sunday, April 15, in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Quartet for the end of Time,” composed by Oliver Messiaen, will be performed by the Liberace Quartet with clarinetist Shawn Copeland, at 3:30 p.m. in the Recital Hall of the School of Music. The public is welcome at no charge for the concert.
Rebecca Rischin, associate professor of clarinet at Ohio University, and author of “For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet,” will deliver a lecture as part of the event.
The composition was written in 1941 by Oliver Messiaen, a clarinetist interned in a German prison camp. There, he discovered a clarinetist, violinist and cellist among his fellow prisoners. The success of the trio led him to add seven more movements and a piano to the ensemble. Messiaen and his friends first performed the complete work before 5,000 fellow prisoners on January 15, 1941.
According to Messiaen, the Quartet was a musical extension of the Biblical concept of the end of Time as the end of past and future and the beginning of eternity.
Established in 1980, Holocaust Remembrance Day is a worldwide commemoration for remembering the victims of the Holocaust and for working to prevent genocide and other atrocities.
For more information, contact the School of Music at (336) 334-5789, or visit www.uncg.edu/mus.
University Relations
Location: 500 Forest Street
Mailing Address: PO Box 26170, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
Telephone:336.334.3783
Fax:336.334.4602