BY MIRANDA ILCHEF, LEAD WRITER (NSW)
KRONOS Five Decades
Kronos Quartet
Sydney Opera House, 14 March
It is rare to attend a string quartet concert in which the audience regularly whoops and giggles, but then again, the Kronos Quartet is something of a rare string quartet. Kronos has built up an international fan base strong enough that when the musicians performed “crowd favourites” from their repertoire at their recent concert in the Sydney Opera House, it elicited a vocal response from their devotees.
It is pretty easy to understand the excitement. Kronos’ legacy is large and arguably more diverse than any other chamber group, while the list of impressive co-collaborators and names associated with the quartet is equally long and varied. They’ve covered Jimi Hendrix, Sigur Rós, and Bob Dylan, and they have performed live with Bowie, McCartney, Björk, and poet Allen Ginsberg. The Kronos Quartet has played movie soundtracks (such as Requiem for a Dream, Zappa, and Heat), and more recently video-game soundtracks too. Its body of work includes music from Mexican to Romania, and Indonesia to Azerbaijan. You would be hard-pressed to find a person on this planet whose favourite music style, genre, or artist could not be found in some sort of collaboration with Kronos Quartet. They have even appeared on Sesame Street.
Kronos’ three long-standing members — David Harrington (violin), John Sheba (second violin), and Hank Dutt (viola) — were joined by the new 2023 addition (charismatic cellist Paul Wiancko) on their recent Australian tour. They started this evening with three works from their noble Fifty for the Future project, which has seen 50 newly-commissioned, student-level string quartet scores made available for free.
First we heard Angélique Kidjo’s YanYanKliYan Senamido #2. From the first note, it was clear the quartet works as one breathing, living organism. The piece itself had an almost spoken-voice quality as it centred around only a few pulsing pitches. Each musician’s deep familiarity with the others’ playing resulted in a perfect togetherness that seemed almost intimate, until I reminded myself that the group has existed for 50 years (which is longer than many marriages), so they probably do have a deeper knowledge of each other than almost anyone else on the planet.
Up next was Peni Candra Rini’s Maduswara, an effective atmospheric exploration of the Javanese jungle, accompanied by a backing track of crickets and frogs. Delicate pizzicato from the viola added to the buzzing insect-like quality, which set the scene for when the piece culminated in a thunderstorm erupting from the texture. Tanya Tagaq brought us an excerpt from Sivunittinni, where the quartet took on the timbre of throat-singing women of Northern Canada with a husky creaking sound produced with a pressed loose bow. The musicians’ commitment to the technique was strong, and plumes of rosin dust flew off at every stroke.
The most giggle-worthy moment came in the next piece, Nicole Lizée’s selections from Zonely Hearts, due to the introduction of most surprising instrument of the evening: pop-rock candy, which came crackling from Harrington and Dutt’s mouths into their instrument microphones. They also incorporated fairly well-choreographed yelling into vintage telephones, which was fitting for a piece inspired by The Twilight Zone. Following this came the significantly more somber Flow by Laurie Anderson, which saw the hall darkened with star-like projections appearing on the ceiling and waves of long sustained notes morphing through subtly-changing harmonies.
The first half finished on a crowd favourite; Steve Reich’s Different Trains. A staple work for Kronos, Different Trains was originally written for the ensemble and draws inspiration from the train journeys taken by Reich as a child in the United States in the 1940s (between his mother’s and father’s houses), and from the much more ominous and oftentimes fatal train journeys being taken by fellow Jewish people at the same time in Europe. In Reich’s classic minimalist style, small fragments are taken and repeated with barely perceptible variations, with an unusual fifth instrument being used in the form of tape recordings from interviews with people who lived through World War II. The instruments mirror these voice fragments: viola is used for the female voices, and cello plays the male parts. Kronos played a truly difficult piece of chamber music with an ease that befits their vast experience with this work.
The second half was much shorter as it consisted only of George Crumb’s historic Black Angels; the piece that inspired Harrington to form the ensemble when he first heard it on the radio. Black Angels demands the full range of extended techniques from the string players. After finally seeing a live performance of this piece, it was instantly much clearer to me that the musicianship and coordination required to manage difficult entries alongside gongs, water-glasses, and pencils cannot be understated. Kronos displayed virtuosity on a completely different scale: a highly refined mental aptitude to execute this challenging piece perfectly.
With a standing ovation and an atmospheric encore by Terry Riley, the evening was over. All the audience members I spoke with after were in agreement that we had seen something special from a legendary group of artists.
At any point in history, the indefinable Kronos Quartet could have stopped where it was and still remained an important note in music history. It could have remained the boundary-breaking “new-music” quartet that originally formed in the 1970s, and still found success. Or it could have been remembered as a very fine purveyor of minimalism in its heyday, rubbing shoulders with Reich, Glass, and Riley. More recently, it might have been satisfied with its achievement as an ethnomusicology-inclined chamber group, bringing music from far corners of the globe to new audiences. It might have even been remembered as a movie and video-game music quartet, ushering in the new age of sound and music consumption. Instead of resting on its laurels, the Kronos Quartet has relentlessly moved and changed with the times, becoming an artistic medium in its own right and in a way that so few other chamber groups have ever accomplished. Kronos has mastered the fine balance of achieving widespread commercial success but never having “sold-out” as it continues to be revered for its artistic and experimental capabilities.
The Kronos Quartet proved once again in its remarkable Sydney show that it defies almost any categorisation; instead of fitting a genre or label, its music expresses life itself.
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Images supplied. Credit Ken Leanfore.
