At last! — I finally made it to my first Piccolo event today. As I’ve told you, my marching orders are to cover the classical end of the big festival — ALL of it — and that means I miss the many world-class acts that have been gracing Piccolo for many years. But I absolutely refused to pass up Monday’s choice Spotlight concert, featuring miraculous music from Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen. And hearing them from the vibrant St. Petersburg String Quartet was a distinct plus.

New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church is an interesting venue: its high, vaulted ceiling seems to draw the music upward before showering it back down on the listeners in a reverberant aura that simply envelops you from all sides. And that effect mostly enhanced the impact of Debussy’s unique String Quartet in G Minor.

Hardly had our fabulous foursome swept us through the romantic first movement, when PLUCK! — Which rhymes with Puck, whom I saw (behind closed eyes) cavorting on tiptoe with elfin abandon as the magical second movement (my favorite part) unfolded. Boris Vayner’s buttery viola made me go all gooey inside in the slow, dreamy third movement: a soothing summer Idyll … that is, until the middle part’s tense emotional pileup. That’s where the SPSQ’s hallmark big sound and heart-on-sleeve sentiment were brought to bear. Oh, Lordy, how I love to hear great Russian musicians at work: you rarely get this kind of emotional intensity from anyone else. The final movement’s slow intro belied its gathering storm; our players milked its lusher passages for all they were worth. But their precision and rhythmic bite were as good as I’ve ever heard in this music. Who says Russian musicians can’t handle French subtlety?

Then, after a brief stretch break, it was on to Messiaen’s milestone Quartet for the End of Time, one of the loftiest pinnacles of 20th Century’s chamber music. But only two of the SPSQ’s players returned: lead violinist Alla Aranovskaya and cellist Leonid Shukayev. That’s because the remaining two guest musicians were of an entirely different breed. Charles Messersmith is principal clarinet with the Charleston Symphony, and they’re blessed to have him. Rounding out the roster was pianist Andrew Armstrong: a perennial Chucktown fave who plays his huge heart out for us every year at Piccolo.

I don’t want to put you to sleep by dragging you blow-by-blow through all eight movements … besides, critics have been pulling their hair out for over half a century attempting to verbally distill this rapturous masterpiece’s full import in mere words. But let’s see if I can find a way to tell you about some of my impressions — and how some of it made me feel. But first, remember that this number was written (and first performed) in a Nazi concentration camp — and its composer was a devout Roman Catholic mystic. It’s one of the handful of modern marvels that first opened my ears (and soul) to music you couldn’t whistle the tunes to.

You can’t talk about Messiaen without talking about birdcalls (they pop up everywhere in his music) — and we got lots of those here, both early on as well as in Messersmith’s wonderful clarinet solo in movement III. Just about everybody got their chance to warble and twitter — but our feathered friends were most convincingly evoked by the clarinet. And I really dug how Charles managed to dredge up ghostly sustained tones out of nothingness, taking them from near-silence to ear-splitting screeches (all on one breath, I might add). He was downright spooky — especially in that acoustic.

We heard the “indescribable harmonies of heaven” in several places along the way — as in the strings’ chantlike ‘vocalise’ passages, hanging over a floating tumble of delicate piano chords. The cello’s quietly ecstatic meditations of movement V (and again with violin in VIII) kept us in realms of luminous ecstasy, love and naked spirituality. The main diversion from said meditative states came in movement VII, with its comfortably colorful “rainbow” music before all hell breaks loose at the end of time.

One more thing needs saying. Some among the capacity crowd may have gotten their noses out of joint when Piccolo mistress Ellen Moryl read the program notes to us before the music began — along with the composer’s own short descriptive analyses between movements. I’m sure that the geekier sophisticates among us who knew the music well could’ve done without them. But this was new music to many of us, and many bedazzled listeners told me afterwards that the readings had helped them get so much more out of this complex, often evasive music than they would’ve gotten otherwise. Most folks never read the program notes, anyway. Years ago, even yours truly had a lot of trouble with this music — until I read the composer’s words. After all, it’s programmatic music of sorts, so we need to know the celestial story. And so I say, “brava, madame” — your instincts were right on.

After this one (and after reading Robert’s inspired, straight-from-the-gut Piccolo blogs), I’m sorrier than ever that I can’t take in more of our illustrious sister festival. You’d be surprised how much of it gives the big show a qualitative run for their money.