MUSIC REVIEW : Kronos Plays at UC Riverside

Before flying off to Europe next week, the Kronos Quartet stopped Thursday night at UC Riverside to launch its 1990-91 season in Southern California.

For fans of the pioneering, controversial and peripatetic San Francisco-based ensemble, that isn’t much of a season. Besides its appearance Thursday, the quartet plays south of Bakersfield only two more times in this concert year: Jan. 12 at UCLA and Jan. 15 at UC Santa Barbara.

In Riverside, there were consolations, not the least of which were visual: Kronos now travels with both an audio engineer (Jay Cloidt) and a lighting designer (Larry Neff). At this performance, Neff provided atmospheric, ever-changing, unobtrusive lighting.

The promised first hearing of a work by the West African composer, Foday Musa Suso, had to be put off--Suso has not finished the piece, violinist David Harrington announced from the stage. But the scheduled world premiere performance of Peter Apfelbaum’s “Lanterns and Cathedrals” did take place.

Apfelbaum’s often dissonant, sometimes neo-Renaissance score, 13-minutes in length and dense with activity, signals, like many of the works produced recently for Kronos, a resurgence of interest in basics: dancey rhythms, aerated instrumental textures, a blunt approach to form. It is both attractive and disturbing.

Also disturbing and invigorating, John Zorn’s recent (also 1990) “The Dead Man” grips the listener through discrete, grating, abrasive and hallucinatory sound events punctuated by dead silence. The four members of Kronos--violinists Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dut and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud--proved, as always, capable of specifying exact musical and technical differences between each of these works.

Justinian Tamusuza’s, “Mu kkubo ery omusaalaba” replaced the unfinished Suso piece at the top of the program, and blithely; it is a brief and buoyantly rhythmic work clearly and charmingly in the key of G.

The program closed with a fully realized, wondrously detailed, tight and impassioned revival of Alban Berg’s Quartet, Opus 3. After that, there were encores, pieces by Kevin Volans and Jay Cloidt.