The string quartet is both the most exclusive and the most approachable of small instrumental combinations. On the one hand it has hosted some of the most profound and ethereal repertory in Western music, while on the other it is peculiarly responsive to popularization. Perhaps having a head-count that approximates the average pop group helps, and there is plenty of scope for projected ‘personality’. But there is also something intriguing about a good piece for string quartet, a sense of being a privileged fly on the wall, eavesdropping on conversations that were only really meant to be shared among four – a sort of cerebral or spiritual voyeurism.
The Kronos Quartet has always known how to make audio theatre out of chamber music, what with its numerous commissions, imaginative programmes, innovative ‘Radio Kronos’, flexible playing style and an openness to world music that is particularly apparent in this majestic 25th anniversary collection. In fairness, one might additionally recall that the excellent Arditti Quartet is also on the eve of celebrating its quarter-century. They too have promoted the cause of new music (the 32-CD Auvidis Arditti Edition is every bit as impressive as Kronos’s work for Nonesuch), but as hard-line avant-gardists, they rarely interest the sort of casual ‘passing trade’ that Kronos attracts more or less as a matter of course. Kronos knows the meaning of quality, but also has the common touch.
Nonesuch offers us a generous helping of reissues, supplemented by around two hours’ worth of new material. So while Arvo Part’s Psalom and Fratres are already available on single Kronos programmes, Summa (which is among the most sensual of Part’s tintinnabulatory works) and the concise Missa Syllabica appear here for the first time. John Adams is represented by the up-tempo delights of John’s Book of Alleged Dances and Steve Reich by his durable – and partly autobiographical – Different Trains. Years ago, Kronos’s leader David Harrington told me how taxing the original Reich sessions had been, but I cannot imagine that Gubaidulina’s compelling Fourth Quartet – which also calls for multiple quartets – would have been much easier to realize. But if you put on the first movement of Kevin Volans’s White Man Sleeps and sample its closing pages, you hear what must surely have been a thematic prompt for Different Trains (Volans’s piece dates ??\\ ??»from 1984, Reich’s from 1988). The similarity is striking.
George Crumb’s terrifying Black Angels is a sort of anti-Vietnam War protest in sound that anticipates Schnittke in its juxtaposition of the old (in this case Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet) and the new. Both Schnittke and Gorecki suggest profound inner conflicts laid bare, though the specific manners of their personal expression are highly contrasted: those who are rested by Gorecki’s ubiquitous Third Symphony (another Nonesuch hit, 4/93) should brace themselves for his chamber music.
Kronos back-pack across city, desert or plain, sighing deeply with Astor Piazzolla (on bandoneon) for his Five Tango Sensations and toughening up for his more aggressive Four, for Tango (another first release). Turn then to Osvaldo Golijov and you confront the Jewish world of kletzmer, with clarinettist David Krakauer spicing up The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind – a more vigorous and visionary encounter than you’ll find on most echt-kletzmer CDs. Franghiz Ali-Zadeh conjures folk motives from Azerbaijan, and Peter Sculthorpe (in Jabiru Dreaming, Quartet No. 8, From Ubirr) reinvents the music of the Aborigines (offered here for the first time on CD). P. Q. Phan’s tragi-comic Tragedy at the Opera recalls a Vietnamese singer who died in the line of stage duty (trying to sing a female role) and among the Americans, Ken Benshoof gives us his accessible, mostly upbeat Traveling Music (the Kronos’s first commission) and the extraordinarily moving elegy Song of Twenty Shadows – again a first release. Morton Feldman is represented by his slow-breathing, delicately textured Piano Quartet (with Aki Takahashi), Philip Glass by four surprisingly variegated Quartets (Nos. 2-5) and Terry Riley by excerpts from Salome Dances for Peace (the most minimalistic music on the set), the neo-baroque G Song (Riley’s first piece for Kronos) and the colourful Cadenza on the Night Plain. The last two are first releases.
Nonesuch’s presentation is a minor work of art in itself and the documentation an informed easy read, though there is precious little to indicate what is – or what is not – a first release. You would be hard pressed to find a friendlier, or more attractive entree to the world of new music, but it would also be great to hear Kronos cue some older repertory masterpieces, works that – like those featured here – create their own very individual sound worlds. I think of Haydn’s Op. 76 No. 5, Beethoven’s Opp. 131, 132 and 135, Mozart’s K421, Mendelssohn’s Op. 13, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden or the quartets of Grieg, Sibelius and Kreisler. All have a candour that transcends specific eras and would work wonderfully well within mixed programmes. Maybe some time during the next 25 years.'