SEE Magazine
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved

Cover Story
BY JERRY OZIPKO 
CLASSICAL PREVIEW
Kronos Quartet
Winspear Centre
Monday, Feb. 8

When upstart violinist David Harrington conceived a vision in Seattle in 1973, he and fellow musicians Jim Schallenberger, Tim Killian and Walter Gray had no inkling of the eventual impact Kronos Quartet would play in the development of contemporary string repertoire or the growth in public awareness of the string quartet as a musical genre.

Nor, it seems, did they have a keen grasp of Greek mythology. Though Harrington is loathe to broach the subject of the band’s name during interviews, he did explain its origin in a 1985 article in High Fidelity/Musical America. Apparently, Harrington read about Chronos, the Greek god of time, and became intrigued with the name. “I thought, that sounds really neat,” he said in the article. “Time, timeliness, things ticking away. The idea really interested me, but I just couldn’t stand the spelling, so I decided to go with a ‘K.’

“I’ve since found out that Kronos with a ‘K’ is a whole different god. He was the father of Zeus and Poseidon, who was best known for devouring his children. And since then, I’ve spent a lot of time denying that I knew what Kronos with a ‘K’ meant when I named the quartet.”

The ensemble, however, has always known its way around string music. Its very first concert at North Seattle Community College featured four works – Bèla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 3 (1927), Anton Webern’s Six Bagatelles (1911/13), George Crumb’s Dark Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) for electric string quartet (1970) and Travelling Music, a work composed by Harrington’s composition teacher, Ken Benshoof, on a commission paid for with a bag of doughnuts.

Now, on the heels of last year’s 25th anniversary celebration, Kronos Quartet is set to open the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra’s brand new rESOund Festival of Contemporary Music with a performance on Monday, Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. in the Winspear Centre. It’s a fitting beginning for a festival that will also include the likes of the Stuttgart Chamber Choir, Robert Aitken, and local performers such as the Brian Webb Dance Company, the Kokopelli Choir, the NOWage Orchestra and Saint Crispin’s Chamber Ensemble.

The combined experiences of all these performers, however, will have trouble rivalling the storied history of the festival’s openers. Kronos Quartet’s early years were filled with various experiences – performances being only a small part. There were commissions from various composers, intensive coaching sessions with visiting musicians and training courses with the Lenox Quartet in New York. Between 1975 and 1977, Kronos was the String Quartet in Residence at the University in Geneseo, New York.

After relocating to San Francisco, where members felt they would find the necessary environment of freedom and experimentation to nurture their collective vision, Kronos began to change public conceptions of classical string quartets forever. There were performances of Penderecki at San Quentin Prison, The Star-Spangled Banner at Candlestick Park, and arrangements of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Jimi Hendrix’ Purple Haze at the Great American Music Hall. To quote from their promotional biography, Four Hundred Candles: The Creation of a Repertoire, “they finished out their (San Francisco-based) Mills College residency with a program including James Brown’s Sex Machine and a performance with a robot named Elvik.”

By now, Kronos Quartet can take credit for commissioning and/or premièring over 400 new string quartets from four generations of composers from nations spanning six continents. Recording exclusively for Nonesuch Records, Kronos has released 25 recordings since 1986.

Their most recent double CD, Kronos Quartet Performs Alfred Schnittke: The Complete String Quartets, has been nominated for Grammy Awards in two categories – Best Classical Album and Best Chamber Music Performance. The recording reflects a collective commitment to inspire the best efforts from those composers the quartet eventually commissions. Sadly, Schnittke, who had been ill for some time, died this past August.

Harrington is the only original member. Violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud all joined in 1977. Jeanrenaud, however, is on sabbatical and is being replaced on the current tour by Jennifer Culp. And to hear Harrington tell it, the nature of Kronos Quartet’s work is enough that the occasional sabbatical isn’t a surprise.

“There’s a lot of very intense (things) we do,” he said in a recent interview with SEE. “Not only the travelling and the performing and all of that, but behind the scenes . . . there are hundreds and thousands of hours of rehearsal.”

Still, for Harrington, playing with Kronos Quartet is the best job in the world.

“For me, one of the great things about playing the music we play and playing in the group that we have is that rehearsal – where we’re exchanging ideas and trying out music and trying to find reality. It’s like a laboratory and we can experiment with the way music can be played and can go and we can try it a hundred different ways or more than a hundred different ways and try to find a way that feels right for us.”

Harrington’s feelings on the intensity of the group’s music were summed up in a 1995 interview: “We have always sought out music from composers with a personal vision. Together, these works evoke love and loss, rage and sublime silliness – things we value and things we fear. Sometimes our music takes you to a place you don’t want to go. Sometimes it brings you home.”

Rehearsals of new works are never easy for the group.

“We try to keep (the talking and philosophizing) in balance because it does take a lot of verbal communicating. But it also takes a lot of trial and error of just doing it.”

The quartet is constantly searching for worthy composers from whom they can eventually commission new music.

“I have a little suitcase of tapes and CDs that I restock every time we go out on a tour and basically carry with me all the time. And I am constantly listening to new things.”

Of those who have been asked, no one has ever refused a Kronos commission.

“Occasionally, there is someone that feels that it’s not quite time for them or they’re not ready. They want to work more. Terry Riley is a very good example. It took almost a year for me to convince him that he should write music at all. He was involved in improvising exclusively for a number of years.”

This is the same Riley who composed those wonderful classical/pop/jazz improvisations of the late 1960s and the early 1970s – In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air.

“It was 1979 when we first met,” Harrington recalled. “Following In C, Terry really did not notate music for almost 15 years until he started writing for Kronos. So, at first, it was a question of establishing a rapport with him, and then it was also a question of giving him the confidence that it was something he could do and that his music would sound great.”

One composer whose music Kronos has performed but has yet to be commissioned is George Crumb. Harrington also reported that minimalist composer Steve Reich is in the process of completing a commission for the quartet. He then provided some information about three of the pieces to be performed in Monday’s concert.

“Franghiz (Ali-Zadeh) is a composer from Azerbaijan and Oasis is one of our very newest pieces. In fact, at the moment, I’m still studying the score. All of us are. We’ve begun to rehearse it, but it’s too early for me to provide details of the exact nature of this piece. That’ll be a world première.” 

Riley’s Cortejo Funebre en el Monte Diablo, from Requiem for Adam, was performed for the first time on Jan. 11 in Calgary.

“It’s part of a Requiem that Terry Riley wrote for us. Adam is my son,” Harrington explained.

And with respect to Schnittke’s very introspective String Quartet No. 2, Harrington observed that “the quartets of Schnittke are one of the most personal groups of quartets by any composer that I know and, when you think of all of them in one place, it’s an astonishing autobiographical body of music.

“I think the Second Quartet is definitely central to all his quartets and you have a sense of Schnittke’s relationship to ancient Russian church music. There’s just a sense that this man is truly a master of the sonority of the string quartet. The last page (of his String Quartet No. 4) is one of the most incredible pieces of music that I know of. It’s really amazing.”

Also included on the program for Kronos Quartet’s concert on Monday will be arrangements of Carlos Paredes’ Romance No. 1 and Anibal Troilo’s Responso, Panonia Boundless by Aleksandra Vrebalov, the Canadian première of Ilyo Shin Na’s gak-seo-ree-ta-ryung (Song of the Beggars), an arrangement of Hildegard von Bingen’s O Virtuous Sapientie, and the Canadian première of a work in progress by Philip Glass. Following the concert, the quartet will autograph CDs. Live entertainment will commence at 10 p.m. in the Alley Kat Pub in the main lobby of the Winspear Centre.