Appropriately, Chamber Players Finish Their Season With 'the End'

"Quartet for the End of Time" is a 20th-century touchstone, a piece that has become legendary for the circumstances of its premiere perhaps even more than for the ambitious religious program of its composer, Olivier Messiaen. It was completed and first played in 1941, when the composer was interned as a German prisoner of war. It was performed by four musicians -- on clarinet, violin, cello and piano -- thrown together by circumstances, for an audience of fellow captives. To some, this back story can outweigh even the piece's subject: The Catholic Messiaen sought to depict an allegory of the end of time, proclaimed by a terrifying angel surrounded by rainbows and fire.

The quartet's unusual instrumentation has inspired more than one ensemble (the same four instruments were used to play John Williams's "Air and Simple Gifts" at President Obama's inauguration in January). And the work itself remains one of Messiaen's most-performed. In 2008, the late composer's centenary year, it was heard several times in Washington. And the Kennedy Center Chamber Players -- made up of players from the National Symphony Orchestra -- chose it to conclude their season at the Terrace Theater on Sunday afternoon.

For all of its dramatic background, the work has a basic simplicity. Messiaen saw music in colors, and his music, to my ear, has an icy clarity, so even its most passionate effusions burn with a glittering, cold fire. To an audience lulled by Mozart -- whose massive and lyrical K. 515 quintet led off Sunday's program -- Messiaen's birdsongs may sound a little unusual, yet his work is startlingly direct in its expression. Its meanings are all the clearer when accompanied by the movement-by-movement program that the composer wrote himself. The third of the eight movements, for example, "Abime des Oiseaux," depicts the contrast between the abyss of time and the sense of hope and light represented by birdsong. Loren Kitt, the solo clarinet, drew out the long, dark tones of the abyss, and then (twice) rose from a tender and minute pianissimo to a tremendously loud climax in some of the most effective crescendos I've heard, before breaking into antic birdsong.

Lambert Orkis, the pianist, is a wonderful collaborator, grasping the clear gentleness of the chords he played (in, for example, the seventh movement, "Cluster of rainbows for the Angel who announces the end of time"). In the sixth movement, he struck flinty notes to spark the more aggressive music of a "Dance of Fury, for the seven trumpets," which starts with a long chain of unison notes, unspooling breathlessly with a kind of childlike ferocity.

Nurit Bar-Josef, the NSO's concertmaster, and David Hardy, the orchestra's principal cellist, had reflecting solo movements, each a meditation on Jesus (the cello praises His eternity in the fifth movement, and the violin praises His immortality in the last one). Hardy, who plays with rich warmth, sounded a little out of his element with Messiaen's long, almost sexless notes; Bar-Josef's silvery lightness sounded more fittingly ethereal.

But in the Mozart, these two players established a wonderful dialogue in the opening movement, exchanging and transforming each other's phrases. Large in scope, the Quintet in C also projects a slightly innocent worldview, though it is earthly in comparison to Messiaen's evocation of the Beyond. Hardy and Bar-Josef joined Teri Hopkins Lee (violin) and the violists Daniel Foster and Mahoko Eguchi for a generally happy performance. Newly returned from their Asia tour, where they did not have an opportunity to practice, the players were not always fused into a cohesive whole, but their conversation was lively enough to make up for the occasional bobble.