Music : Kronos Returns With New Works

When the Kronos Quartet returned to Southern California on Saturday night, one noted again that there are real pretensions in its arty, ever-changing stage lighting as well as in its choice literally to keep its audience in complete darkness--one always wants, it seems, to read program notes where new works are concerned.

Still, Kronos’ lighting style, like its idiosyncratic stage-set may be only symptomatic of the extreme care the players of the quartet take in all aspects of producing provocative concerts.

In the sometimes notorious Robert B. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College, the San Francisco-based ensemble brought its followers another tight and intriguing program, this time new or recent works by composers the Kronos has championed before.

It became an agenda moving from cheery, tonal, folk-based and relatively brief pieces by Dumisani Maraire and Hamza El Din, into increasingly lengthy, abrasive, listener-hostile and violent works by John Zorn, John Oswald, Peter Sculthorpe and H. M. Gorecki.

As usual, it seems, Kronos--violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud--created an evening both disturbing and irresistible.

Most disturbing, and probably most valuable, is “Jabiru Dreaming,” Sculthorpe’s 11th Quartet, a 13-minute work of strong, compacted and wide-ranging emotions that demands further hearings. Kronos, it almost goes without saying, gave it as intense and kaleidoscopic a reading as its materials may require.

Less threatening but equally impassioned, both in content and performance, was Gorecki’s Second Quartet, subtitled “Quasi una Fantasia.” Tightly organized and stylistically eclectic, this is a piece that emerges self-contained but deeply felt, touching many--perhaps too many--emotional bases before subsiding in silence. Kronos seemed to probe its complexities.

Complementary staging and lighting seemed to illuminate the musical performances of Zorn’s electronics-dominated “The Dead Man” and the six short but pithy movements of Oswald’s appealing “Spectre.” Here, as throughout the concert, one cannot overstate the accomplished contributions of lighting designer Larry Neff and audio engineer Scott Fraser--everything Kronos plays seems to be engineered, and without apology--to these serious realizations of serious music.