Return to Messiaen's cosmos

The members of the defunct ensemble Tashi - (from left) Ida Kavafian, Peter Serkin, Fred Sherry, and Richard Stoltzman - reunite to perform Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time." (Wiqan ang for the boston globe)

CAMBRIDGE - The much-admired but long-defunct ensemble known as Tashi recently answered the trumpet call of the Messiaen centenary by reviving itself for a handful of concerts, including a brilliant appearance on Friday night before a packed audience at Harvard's Paine Hall.

The original group - clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, violinist Ida Kavafian, cellist Fred Sherry, and pianist Peter Serkin - first came together in 1973 to play Messiaen's luminous "Quartet for the End of Time," a piece written when the composer was interned in a German prison camp during the Second World War, a circumstance that infused his musical-mystical eschatology with a rare urgency of expression. Tashi's recording helped establish the work as a defining landmark of 20th-century music, but the ensemble in its original configuration ended with Serkin's departure in 1979.

So a sense of occasion was in the air as this foursome took the stage on Friday night, now at the other ends of their careers, and looking delighted to be reliving a bit of their past lives. As the crowd welcomed them, Stoltzman briefly lofted his hands in the air as if to celebrate the very fact that, well, there they all were again.

The program's raison d'etre was naturally a reprise of Messiaen's Quartet, but Tashi wisely placed the work last. The ensemble opened with works by Josquin des Prez and Thomas Morley recomposed for the ensemble by Charles Wuorinen. Elliott Carter's "Con Leggerezza Pensosa" displayed his signature rugged wit and condensed theatricality of gesture, as slow-moving music got sliced and diced by rapid violin figurations and sharply articulated runs in the clarinet.

Toru Takemitsu's beautifully introverted "Quatrain II" concluded the first half. Written expressly for Tashi, it was inspired by the "Quartet for the End of Time" and soaked in the colors of French Impressionism transfigured by Takemitsu's spare and refined musical language. Listening to this work, you could be forgiven for picturing Debussy and Messiaen exchanging musical secrets in a Japanese garden.

But a palpable undertow seemed to tug the evening toward the Messiaen Quartet, the sole work on the second half. That's why all of us, including the musicians, were there. In the end, Tashi gave this buzzing, fiery, and ultimately sublime music an entrancing reading, one that was not about nostalgic journeys back to hallowed ground of decades past but about passionate, deeply felt music-making in the here and now.

Serkin presided with cool majesty at the keyboard, dispensing chords with a quiet pearly iridescence or conjuring a vast carillon that tolled out the messages of Messiaen's angels. At key moments, Stoltzman's tone seemed to materialize grain by grain out of thin air. Sherry and Kavafian did eloquent justice to their respective solo movements. The group performs at Tanglewood's Ozawa Hall on Aug. 7. Catch them if you can.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.