Kronos at 50

The Kronos Quartet were already well into their second decade when I saw them for the first time, sharing the bill with John Zorn’s Naked City at the Royalty Theatre in London in November 1988. They closed their set with Aarvo Pärt’s “Fratres”, whose hushed, prayer-like cadences were what stuck in my head, and are still there. But they’d become famous for daring to introduce the compositions of Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and Jimi Hendrix to the format, and for making it clear that they’d be treating those works with the seriousness, rigour and spirit of inquiry that others applied to the standard Beethoven-to-Bartók string quartet repertoire.

Last night at the Barbican, during a year-long tour to mark the 50th anniversary of their creation in San Francisco by the violinist David Harrington, “Purple Haze” was their encore: a shout of joy to celebrate their longevity and the continued relevance of their founding ideal. Harrington and his fellow violinist John Sherba, Hank Dutt on viola and Paul Wiancko, the latest recruit to the cello seat filled so long and so brilliantly by Joan Jeanrenaud, worked their way through a dozen pieces, divided into two sets, coming as close to a career summary as would be possible in two hours for an organisation that, in its lifetime, has commissioned more than a thousand works.

Two guest artists appeared, both on pieces specially written for the quartet: the Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini to deliver the swooping, chattering vocal lead on her “Maduswara” and the London-born djembe player Yahael Camara Onono to add percussive momentum to Dumisani Maraire’s “Mother Nozipo”. There were reminders of Kronos’s early days in the performance of works by three Americans commonly, if misleadingly, called minimalists: Philip Glass with a piece from the Mishima soundtrack, Steve Reich’s dense and fast-flowing “Triple Quartet”, and Terry Riley with “Lunch in Chinatown”, a light-hearted extract from a new suite featuring the members of the group chatting as if ordering a meal in a restaurant.

For me, the moments of seriousness were the most powerful. The ethereal “God-music” from George Crumb’s Black Angels featured Wiancka coaxing fragile melodies built out of harmonics from his cello while Harrington, Sherba and Dutt each bowed a table full of wine glasses. Dutt took the lead on Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of Antonio Haskell’s “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away”, a setting of a gospel song recorded in 1938 by Mahalia Jackson. This directly followed an excerpt from Zachary James Walker’s Peace Be Still, played against projection of newsreel footage from the Alabama civil rights marches in 1965 and the words of Clarence B. Jones, Martin Luther King Jr’s lawyer and adviser. Jones had helped draft the “I have a dream” speech given at the March on Washington in 1963 — which only took its final form during the speech itself, when Mahalia implored King to break away from his prepared script and tell the crowd of more than 250,000 about his dream.

And then there was their arrangement of Alfred Schnittke’s “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief”, which they recorded in 1997, a year before the composer’s death: its skeins of muted melodies and modal harmonic underpinning settled on the hall like a pale but gently glowing mist, much as I remember “Fratres” doing 35 years ago.