Quartet for the End of Time, written by French composer Olivier Messiaen while he was interned as a German prisoner of war in 1940, rests at the heart of this season’s Renewal series — concerts that will consider the issues of prison reform, the climate crisis, and immigration.

Presented by NOVUS NY, this Renewal concert on November 16, at 6:30 pm, in Trinity Church includes Olivier Messiaen’s full Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time). Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers will narrate the concert with excerpts from his book Orfeo.

This concert is free, and registration is required. Seating will be first come, first served.

About NOVUS NY: Trinity’s new music orchestra, NOVUS NY, is a key player in the contemporary music scene. These “expert and versatile musicians” (The New Yorker) perform new music from all corners of the repertoire, meeting “every challenge with an impressive combination of discipline and imagination” (New York Classical Review). Learn more about Trinity’s music program.

About Richard Powers: Powers’s characters themselves shift between the impulse to connect and its inevitable crash and burn; between the Emersonian urge to embrace the difficult ad-lib of the world and the Dickinsonesque need to recoil from its evident bruising into the supple sanctuary of the aesthetic enterprise, to withdraw into the secured refuge of a novel, a piece of music, a movie house, a museum, even cyberspace. Although long reluctant to encourage the distraction of biography, Powers has lived—like his characters—sustained within a curiously similar geography; never quite at home, never quite comfortable with belonging, shifting between engagement and escape. (Excerpted from Understanding Richard Powers by Joseph Dewey)

Time: 6:30 — 8:00 pm EST

Free!

Registration