The Crypt Sessions presents Quartet for the End of Time

Friends, Crypt-Dwellers, Catacombers, and All Manner of Subterranean Adventurers,

It is with great joy and excitement that I announce the first concert of the Fourth Season of The Crypt Sessions - Messiaen's towering, otherworldly Quartet for the End of Time, performed on February 5, 2019, by an insanely luxury-cast ensemble of Stefan Jackiw (violin), Jay Campbell (cello), Orion Weiss (piano) and Yoonah Kim (clarinet). More details below.

Tickets for this momentous kick-off will go on sale January 3, and will be folded into a VERY exciting announcement about The Crypt Sessions, as well as our other series The Angel's Share, which takes place in the Catacombs of The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Stay tuned for more to come! It's a pleasure and an honor to be on this wonderful journey with you, and in the meantime we'll be wishing all of you beautiful people a fantastic holiday.
-Andrew Ousley

The Long Version

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was composed in a Nazi prison camp, where it was premiered in the pouring rain by starving inmates playing on broken instruments. To this day, it stands as one of the most utterly profound and transcendent meditations on mortality and eternity - music steeped in mystery, born out of a deep faith unshaken by the horrors surrounding it. It shows us a vision of immorality that lies in songs of the birds, the trills in the trees, shimmering rainbows, and a single cello line reaching toward the divine.

Each of the four performers - Stefan Jackiw, Jay Campbell, Orion Weiss and Yoonah Kim - could fill a concert hall on their own. But this classical supergroup will come together in the Crypt to pour their near-limitless musical talents into a single, unified expression of what it means to find beauty in the darkness.

The Short Version

Come stand at the edge of the abyss with us, and listen to something that will remind you that there will always be things in life that are beyond our comprehension.

‍