Freedom in the air and on the wall

The next concert in Absolute Gallery´s long-running chamber music series, Absolute Music, will fuse the visions of New York painter Richard Estrin with the music of a 20th-century visionary, Olivier Messiaen.

Friday night, the Lansing-based Arcos Trio and guest clarinetist Daniel Gilbert from the University of Michigan will play Messiaen´s "Quartet for the End of Time," one of the most moving and original works of the turbulent 20th century. Five new paintings by Estrin, inspired by Messiaen´s quartet, will be on the walls for the concert and stay up for at least a month.

The fusion of the two arts is so tight that Estrin couldn´t help describing his work in musical terms.

"Some of the paintings are quiet; some are loud," he said. "Some are a little bit murky. They all have a little bit of mystery."

A concert series in an art gallery is a perfect chance to blend music and art, but Absolute Music artistic director Richard Sherman waited a few years for just the right match. A few years into the Absolute Music series, Sherman, who is also the principal flutist of the Lansing Symphony, met Estrin at New York´s Chautauqua arts festival. The two hit it off immediately.

"I thought his eye was quite remarkable," Sherman said.

Sherman knew that Messiaen´s quartet was on the docket this year. With its delirious mix of sonic colors and religious fervor, the quartet seemed just right for a multi-media project. Estrin eagerly accepted the challenge, but it wasn´t easy.

He listened to the quartet dozens of times before picking up a brush.

"I was swept away," he said. "I was floundering in the music, but in a good way."

Messiaen wrote the quartet in 1940 while imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a German prisoner-of-war camp 55 miles east of Dresden. He drew upon two sources of lift to propel his spirit over the barbed wire fences. Throughout the quartet, religion, in the form of Catholicism, and nature, in the form of birdsong, beat like two wings that lift the soul out of captivity.

Estrin spent much of his life creating what he calls "traditional art," inspired largely by his rural upbringing in upstate New York. Graduate study at Indiana University exposed him to abstract painting and other modern approaches, but he still reverts to traditional painting "by default."

His reaction to Messiaen´s music was so strong that he threw the book away and looked for a new approach. Hints of nature are still visible, but they are crystallized into meditations, their colors heightened to the fever pitch of Messiaen´s music.

"Sometimes we really need to let go of everything we know and trust," he said. "The sum total of our experiences will provide a way."

At first, Estrin thought of making one painting for each of the quartet´s seven movements, but that was too neat a solution.

"There´s so many shifts in the music, so many cross themes, that the music knits together throughout the quartet," Estrin said.

He decided to create diptychs that reflect the quartet´s end-to-end fusion of the brutal and the sublime.

"Diptychs are two panels that work together but set up a direct contrast," he said. "It´s very logical for this project."

Sherman is impressed by Estrin´s struggles and solutions to a tough assignment.

"He´s a true artist in that respect, always searching things through on a deep level," Sherman said.

Far from limiting him as an artist, Estrin found the job liberating. "Freedom is a wonderful thing," Estrin said. "With parameters comes freedom. You´re pushing against something."

The search for freedom within limits — including the limits of time and mortality — throbs from Messiaen´s music and Estrin´s art.

"I composed this quartet … to escape from the snow, from the war, from captivity, and from myself," Messiaen said later in an interview. "The greatest benefit that I drew from it was that in the midst of thirty thousand prisoners, I was the only man who was not one."

´Quartet for the End of Time´

Paintings by Richard Estrin Absolute Gallery, through Feb. 20

Absolute Music

"Quartet for the End of Time" Arcos Trio with Daniel Gilbert, clarinet 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23 Absolute Gallery 307 E. Grand River Ave., Lansing $15 517-333-6616 absolutemusiclansing.org