They Broke the Sound Barrier

In the early days of the Kronos Quartet, its mastermind and first violinist, David Harrington, confessed preposterous ambitions. He dreamed, he once said, of the quartet someday opening a Rolling Stones concert at the Oakland Coliseum. He also expected that Kronos would revitalize the string quartet repertory, as it reinvented just about everything the stalwart combination of four string instruments had meant to classical music for 200 years.

The first aspiration, never happened--although Kronos does make a guest appearance on the recent best-selling rock album by the Dave Matthews Band. The second, however, has proved an understatement. Kronos, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, has brought to life some 400 new string quartets of unprecedented variety.

And more. By successfully breaking down so many barriers separating classical, popular and world musics, the ensemble has made such interaction a persuasive model for a music of the future. The string quartet medium, in great part thanks to Kronos, enjoys rosy health.

Still, even Kronos, with its appetite for the new, can become reflective, and that was the mood of its anniversary programs at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Sunday afternoon and the Irvine Barclay Theatre Monday night, as it is of a beautiful 10-CD box set that Nonesuch will release next week.

At UCLA, much of the music was neither new nor written for string quartet. The program, for instance, began with a transcription of Harry Partch’s 1941 hobo masterpiece, “U.S. Highball,” and ended with a transcription for piano and string quartet of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” On Monday Kronos revisited classic modern string quartets, including George Crumb’s scary 1970 Vietnam-inspired “Black Angels” and Alfred Schnittke’s Second String Quartet from 1980. Both programs included Osvaldo Golijov’s incredibly affecting transcription of the traditional tune “Gloomy Sunday.”

These pieces tell us a lot about what makes Kronos tick. The ensemble exists only because Harrington had a burning desire to play “Black Angels” the minute he first heard it on the radio in 1973. A staged version, which Kronos has been performing for the past few years (and which has just been made into a strong video currently being broadcast over the arts network Ovation, which is not carried by Southland cable companies), is the latest manifestation of Harrington’s obsession with this piece. It becomes an unfussy ritual that enhances the music’s theatrical implications, which include chanting in various languages, playing gongs and bowing crystal glass.

“Rite of Spring,” on the other hand, gains very little by Kronos’ version of it, arranged by John Geist for the quartet and pianist Margaret Kampmeier. Meeting the audience for questions after the UCLA performance, Harrington explained that none of the members of the quartet had ever had the opportunity to play this seminal 20th century orchestra score, and so they decided to take matters into their own hands. There is something to be learned from hearing the “Rite” divorced from its orchestral sonorities, especially in the way that brings out the folk melodies often lost in the modernist orchestral crush, but a familiar two-piano version long ago made that point.

The transcription of Partch’s “hobo confabulation,” as it was once called, is more important. Partch’s music is mostly lost to us because it was created for unique, homemade instruments. But Ben Johnston, a student of Partch’s and a superb composer of string quartets in his own right, has been making a series of viable transcriptions of Partch for Kronos, and “U.S. Highball,” for quartet and singer, is the most substantial. A set of songs, sung with a fine ear for Partch’s microtones by David Barron, “U.S. Highball” follows the hobo Slim on his lonely wanderings, hopping trains and living in camps. It captures the time and mood of the Depression with startling immediacy.

Kronos’ members--violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud in addition to Harrington--still appear vibrantly youthful, but there was a certain somberness to these concerts. Surely there is no sadder music than “Gloomy Sunday”--which, when Billie Holiday sang it, had people jumping out of windows--and the emotional intensity of Kronos’ performance had stunning depth. Perhaps that reflects the players’ own personal losses, which Terry Riley memorializes in three new “Requiem Quartets.” Two of them, “Mario in Cielo” (for Jeanrenaud’s stillborn son) and “Lacrymosa--Remembering Kevin” (for Dutt’s companion) were played Monday. The first was rhythmically consoling; the second, a sweet, touching song.

That level of emotional depth was also apparent in the quartet’s performance of the Schnittke, which followed. The Second Quartet could almost be a requiem for the Russian spirit that Schnittke felt was seeping from his homeland. There had been some intonation problems on Sunday, but the next day’s Schnittke performance was exact and to devastating effect.

Kronos, of course, remains as impetuous as ever about playing new work. Contracts yet unfinalized prevented the quartet from identifying a new score by Philip Glass on Sunday. But nothing could stop Kronos from playing it. Called a work in progress, it clearly is from the music that Glass has written to accompany the 1931 Bela Lugosi film “Dracula,” to be released at Halloween next year. It should work splendidly.