MUSIC REVIEW : Much Ado About Kronos at Wadsworth

The Kronos Quartet always--well, almost always--puts on a good show. Sometimes it also puts on a good concert.

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Not this time.

Saturday night at the Wadsworth Theater, the ever-popular, ever-iconoclastic foursome from San Francisco ended its UCLA season with an eclectic evening of local premieres. The performances were, I think, splendid. The program was, to be sure, provocative. Still, not much happened.

The trappings were familiar. The players, led by David Harrington in his Technicolored dream-coat, sported the latest in funky chic. (Or was it chicky funk?) The conventional string tones were, on occasion, subjected to trendy electronic echoes and blurs. When the spirits, and composers, moved them, the protagonists abandoned their accustomed instruments to do some neat percussive tricks.

The house was kept dramatically dark--so dark that it was impossible to tell which piece was being played when, much less read the program notes. Entrances and exits were kept to a minimum. Moody illustrative abstractions were projected on the curtain behind the special platform that accommodated the musicians and their specially draped chairs.

No, Jascha, the Budapest Quartet was never like this. But look, man, this is 1993, and the Budapest Quartet never played a concert that dabbled in politically correct satire, multicultural exploration, ethnomusicological cross-dressing and nifty celebrations of with-it sensibilities.

The six-part evening--rather long, reasonably diverse, oddly focused, often gimmicky--began with “Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover” by Michael Daugherty. This turned out to be a crafty melange in which fragments of patriotic drivel from speeches found in the FBI archives were fused with would-be witty commentary by the Kronos cronies. Unfortunately, the awful words overpowered the flimsy musical impulses, which, in the end, offered little beyond sound-effect punctuation.

“Mugam Sayagi” by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh began and ended with Joan Jeanrenaud, the resident cellist, alone on the stage playing a somber, eerie duet with her electronic shadow. Her three colleagues returned only for the agitated middle section, in which John Sherba (second violin) and Hank Dutt (viola) mustered, among other things, some inventive banging on amplified gongs and triangle. This, according to the annotations, invoked the folk rituals of the composer’s native Azerbaijan.

It was beguiling, mildly beguiling, in its clever, understated, self-conscious way.

In “Chang Music IV” by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, the Quartet moved, it says here, to “the traditional and contemporary influences of Central Asia,” specifically the composer’s native Tashkent. Here, some nice, subtle, reflective interplay gave way to frenzied rhythmic passages in which the players tap-tap-tapped secret contrapuntal messages on the wooden parts of their presumably fragile instruments.

The first half of the program ended, and not a moment too soon, with a quiet nod to Beijing via the Coast premiere of Zhou Long’s “Soul.” The central voice in this instance belonged to a guest--the pipa virtuosa Wu Man. Long created very intricate sonic patterns for what unenlightened ears might liken to a banjo in delirium, and he integrated those sounds deftly with the busy plucks and bows of the Western quartet. Essentially, the soloist functioned as one voice in a carefully balanced ensemble.

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The second half of the concert opened with an opus portentously and, perhaps, pretentiously called “Memento Mori (Ignotum per Ignotius)” by John Zorn, whose last name in German means “rage.” The notes offered no clue regarding the title, but they did tell us that the composer admits to “a short attention span,” and that his “jampacked” music “reflects a mercurial fascination with the fast-paced flow of information.”

The work in question, alas, proved less prepossessing than its apologia. It sounded like just another dutiful, over-extended, mechanical essay from the ripple-splotch-and-quiver school of compositional navel-gazing.

The not-so-grand finale introduced “Fannie Lou Hamer,” an ode to a civil-rights heroine by the jazz trumpeter Hannibal Peterson. One had to admire the idealism on display, not to mention the breathless, torchy fervor of the soloist: a gutsy gospel singer named Tuliva-Donna Cumberbatch. The profundity of the social message was hardly complemented, however, by the superficial murk of Peterson’s instrumental formulas.

Perhaps next time. . . .