Seeing the World Through Kronos’ Eyes

The Kronos caravan, laden with flavorful exotica from around the world, pulled into Schoenberg Hall at UCLA on Saturday. The veteran string quartet is traveling again with selections from its world music compilation album, bracketed by substantial recent pieces from Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

Actually, the middle movement of Riley’s “Requiem for Adam” is also on the Kronos Caravan disc, where it sounds at home. As the processional center of this elegy for Kronos violinist David Harrington’s son Adam, who died a few years ago at age 16, it seems heedlessly glib, particularly in its cheesy prerecorded tape part.

The rest of this 40-minute threnody is gorgeous and affecting, save for a few dull patches in the prolix finale. The opening movement, “Ascending the Heaven Ladder,” rises on intricately meshed and evocatively harmonized webs of sonic silver. Harrington and colleagues violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jennifer Culp played it with taut energy.

Reich’s Triple Quartet is also a three-part work, though more concentrated in scale and spirit and with moody modal calm at its center. Its first movement climbs upward too, on firmly beating wings of unreconstructed minimalism. Kronos performs against a tape of itself playing parts for two other quartets, hence the title--the work could be played live by three ensembles.

The pieces from Kronos Caravan included UCLA ethnomusicologist Jihad Racy’s “Ecstasy,” a rounded essay in lyrically circling raptures both transcendental and earthy. The composer, playing the nay, a Near Eastern flute, and percussionist Souhail Kaspar joined the quartet in a graceful, collected performance.

Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Gypsy-tinted “Pannonia Boundless” and three pieces stunningly arranged by prodigious and prolific Osvaldo Golijov--Enrique Rangel’s “La Muerte Chiquita,” Anibal Troilo’s “Responso” and Rahul Dev Burman’s “Aaj Ki Raat”--completed the well-built program. An intense Golijov original, sounding something like a street version of Ravel’s “Tzigane,” was the lone encore.