MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : KRONOS AT UCLA

Terry Riley’s latest work for the Kronos String Quartet, “Salome Dances for Peace,” had its premiere just three weeks ago in Paris. It arrived in Los Angeles Friday night, on a Kronos program at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA. “Salome” is a clear sounding piece, drawing on Near Eastern modes and American popular musics with eclectic abandon. It has a fair amount of surface charm and abundant motor energy, leavened with chill, still moments of dissonant doubt.

It is also redundantly episodic--three movements, each with up to four subdivisions. The general proceedings seem so traditional, that they arouse--and disappoint--expectations of a tune. In that context, everything sounds like an accompaniment bereft of its solo or a transition to nowhere.

Swedish composer Jan Morthenson worked even more self-consciously in a quasi-Eastern mode in his “Apres Michaux.” As played by Kronos in its local premiere, “Apres Michaux” sounds very much like the introductory alap of a Shankar improvisation, with its bent scales and droning accompaniments.

Kronos has never had the richness of sound for so elegant a neo-modal revery as Elliott Carter’s Elegy. But it has the bite, precision and intellectual stamina to do justice by Schoenberg’s Third Quartet.

Kronos often offers a pops surprise in encore. On Friday, a balalaika player, who was waiting in the wings, joined the quartet in an arrangement from Stravinsky’s “Mavra.”