Preview: Messiaen Festival: Spheres of Influence/University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall

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Messiaen the teacher takes center stage at this installment of the University of Chicago Presents’ Messiaen Festival with the Grammy Award-winning ensemble eighth blackbird and the Pacifica Quartet. The program features one of Messiaen’s last works before his 1992 death, a short work written for music publisher and new music champion Alfred Schlee called Piece for Piano and String Quartet but also includes a world premiere by Polish-born composer and U of C professor and former Messiaen student Marta Ptaszynka. Her “Trois visions de l’arc-en-ciel” (“Three visions on a rainbow”) is based on the same instrumentation that Messiaen employed in his “Quartet For the End of Time” plus percussion, which is the one thing Messiaen admitted that he would have added to the work if percussion had been available at the POW camp where he wrote the work and where it was first performed for camp officers and his fellow prisoners during World War II. Pierre Boulez, Messiaen’s most famous student and longtime CSO principal conductor, will be represented by his 1984 “Dérive I” while Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who never studied with Messiaen directly but whose “rain” works were profoundly inspired by him, will be represented by his “Rain Spell.” Other Messiaen students whose compositions will be performed include former Messiaen assistant and translator Gerald Levinson and British composer and conductor George Benjamin. (Dennis Polkow) October 4 at University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57^th, (773)702-8068. 7:30pm. $5-$35.

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