Wigmore Hall

The music

• Messiaen Quatuor pour la fin du temps
• R Strauss Four Last Songs

The performers

• Renée Fleming soprano
• Inon Barnatan piano
• Alan Gilbert violin, conductor
• Nicholas Daniel oboe
• Martin Fröst clarinet
• Jonathan Swensen cello
• Schumann Quartet
• Soloists of the London Philharmonic Orchestra

The catastrophe of the Second World War and the consequences of it shaped both works in this powerful lunchtime programme. Renée Fleming, one of the great voices of our time, joins an exceptional line-up of instrumentalists. She takes centre stage in a chamber-scale version of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, valedictory pieces created under the postwar shadow cast by Nazi Germany’s defeat. The concert’s first half belongs to the Quartet for the End of Time, an apocalyptic work inspired by the Book of Revelation and composed while Messiaen was a prisoner of war.