This remarkable San Francisco collective have now been reinventing the string quartet for 50 years, playing everything from Argentine tango to Azerbaijani folk, from Thelonious Monk to Asha Bhosle, and collaborating with everyone from David Bowie to Allen Ginsberg. You’d expect a weighty retrospective for this golden jubilee – and a 10-minute opening film races through old footage from their career, including a slot on Sesame Street – but this was a largely forward-facing programme.
Kronos have commissioned more than 1,000 new pieces over the years, and this show features some older ones: a 1999 work by Steve Reich in which they perform over a recording of themselves; a 1992 piece by Zimbabwean composer Dumisani Maraire featuring Yahael Camara Onono on djembe; a version of a 1970 George Crumb composition where three band members use their bows to play wine glasses; and a 2018 commission by Bay Area musician Zachary James Watkins where they underscore Martin Luther King’s incredibly powerful letter from Birmingham jail, read by his lawyer Clarence Jones.
They also draw from Fifty for the Future, featuring 50 new commissions from composers around the world, the sheet music of which you can download for free from the Kronos website. There is a beautiful miniature by the Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini, who sings the lead line in unison with Harrington and a charming staccato piece by Terry Riley called Lunch in Chinatown, where the band shout out things that Riley says during lunch meetings (“this eggplant is delicious!”). Best of all is Little Black Book by electronic musician Jlin Patton, a Bernard Herrmann-like horror-movie score arranged by jazz trombonist Jacob Garchik, where cellist Paul Wiancko doubles up on bass drum.
After a deserved standing ovation, the encore is their famous version of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. What sounds like a freak-out is actually a study in precision: Steve Riffkin’s arrangement meticulously incorporates all of the harmonics and glitches from the original, adding tons of rubato. It’s something you notice about so much of tonight’s programme – from an arrangement of a Mahalia Jackson spiritual to a 1940s Mexican folk song, Kronos never complicate their melodies: these are four stunning virtuosos who know the power of restraint.
