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Posts tagged ‘Kronos Quartet’

Oct 22

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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.

Oct 23

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Terry Riley’s ‘Sun Rings’

Kronos Sun Rings

Back in 2002 I was fortunate enough to be present when Sun Rings, an extended composition written by Terry Riley for the Kronos Quartet and a 60-voice choir, was given its world premiere in the University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium. The partnership between the composer and the quartet celebrates its fortieth anniversary next year; among Riley’s works premiered and recorded by the group have been Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, Cadenza on the Night Plain, Salome Dances for Peace, The Cusp of Magic and Requiem for Adam. But Sun Rings was something different: the musicians and singers were accompanied by sounds harvested from space by the scientists at NASA as their Voyager probes hurtled past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The sound of space — strange chattering, howling and chirruping — was originally captured by Don Gurnett, a research scientist at the university in Iowa City who designed the plasma-wave equipment carried by the probes to record the noises — called “whistlers” — made by electrons whizzing about in the magnetic fields surrounding the planets. Gurnett told me that while their existence had been detected by a German scientist during the First World War, he was the first person to retrieve them from space and to turn the signals into sound.

He had given cassettes of the recordings to Riley, divided under headings like “auroral hiss”, “electron plasma oscillation” and “electron cyclotron harmonic emissions”. The composer chose the ones he liked and made them an integral part of the piece, triggered in real time by the four members of Kronos using fibre-optic wands. The hour-long work, commissioned as part of NASA’s long-standing arts programme, featured lighting and back-projections created by Willie Williams, a Yorkshireman who worked with Deaf School, Stiff Little Fingers and others before joining U2 for the Zoo TV tour and then moving on to collaborate with the Stones and Bowie.

After the Iowa concert, which was quite an experience, the work was given its European premiere at the Barbican. Now an album, recorded in a studio in 2017, makes the piece available to everyone.

Here’s what David Harrington, Kronos’s leader, has to say about Riley in the notes to Sun Rings: “There is no other composer who has added so many new musical words to our vocabulary, words from many corners of the musical world. Terry introduced Kronos to Pandit Pran Nath, Zakir Hussein, Bruce Connor, La Monte Young, Anna Halprin, Hamza El Din, Jon Hassell, Gil Evans… I have never once heard him say an unkind word about another musician. In a crazed world laced with violence and destruction, he has consistently been a force for peace. Through his gentle leadership, a path has emerged. Terry sets the standard for what it means to be a musician in our time.”

All that is apparent in the 10th and final section of Sun Rings, titled “One Earth, One People, One Love”. Those words belong to the writer Alice Walker, and a recording of her voice intoning them is the leitmotif of a piece which begins with a description of the astronaut’s experience of looking at Earth from space by Eugene Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 mission. This extraordinarily beautiful nine-minute piece is slow-paced, the strings moving gently through the sounds of space, with Sunny Yang’s lyrical cello prominent as the passing of time is marked by what might be a tuned drum and a damped bell. Bringing us back home, this is music that speaks to everyone.

* Sun Rings is out now on the Nonesuch label. The photograph of the Kronos Quartet performing the piece in Krakow in 2014 is from the accompanying booklet and was taken by Wojciech Wandzel.

Oct 11

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Trio Da Kali / Kronos Quartet

Kronos Quartet photographed in Berkeley, CA December 12, 2013©Jay BlakesbergIt’s been my experience that no time spent checking out the Kronos Quartet’s latest activity is ever wasted, and the group’s new album, Ladilikan, in which they accompany Mali’s Trio Da Kali, is a beauty. The meeting between the voice of Hawa Diabaté, the balafon of Lassana Diabaté and the bass ngoni of Mamadou Kouyaté and the violins of David Harrington and John Sherba, the viola of Hank Dutt and the cello of Sunny Yang turns out to sound like something that has always existed, somewhere in the universe.

The primary impression is one of rhythmic vitality, with the quartet locking naturally into the trio’s two instruments to create a thoroughly integrated sextet, providing a lovely setting for Hawa Diabaté’s graceful contralto. In between the vocal passages, the band vamps with delicate power and a groove that is at times almost delirious. Approaching the conclusion of the stunning “Lila Bambo”, they come together in a unison coda that sweeps you off your feet.

Halfway through the album they give us something that might well become a classic. At Harrington’s suggestion, Hawa Diabaté sings Mahalia Jackson’s “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away”, with the original organ accompaniment transcribed for the string quartet; the words are translated into Bambara, the first among more than 40 languages spoken by Mali’s various ethnic groups. The controlled ardour of the voice and the grain of the strings — which together recreate the slightly wheezy sound of a portable harmonium — are irresistible (you can hear a snatch of it in this short trailer).

Meticulously produced by Nick Gold and Lucy Duran for the former’s World Circuit label, Ladilikan could well end up being the album I give to friends and family this Christmas. It’s hard to imagine anyone not loving it.

* Trio Da Kali play at the Musicport Festival in Whitby on October 21, then at Opera North, Leeds (22), St Barnabas Church, Oxford (25) and the Old Church, Stoke Newington,  London N16 (26).