Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra

Very few works in the history of composition have been written under such extraordinary circumstances as Messiaen’s »Quartet for the End of Time«. Messiaen had spent several months in a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz by the time he completed the Quartet in 1941. The unusual instrumentation was a consequence of the musicians that happened to be incarcerated in the camp. Rehearsals were held in the washing rooms, and the Quartet, which – as Messiaen himself said – was »directly inspired by the apocalyptic verses« in the Revelation of St. John, was premiered in the so-called theatre barracks before an audience of 500 prisoners of war. The Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra closes its 2018/19 season with a work that is no less monumental: Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 was his last work. Conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt once described Bruckner as an »antenna pointing into the twentieth century«. His Ninth is the perfect demonstration of that. Although unfinished, it pointed far into the twentieth century and paved the way for composers such as Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg.