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.
