San Francisco Classical Voice

Looking at the manic commissioning and performing activity of the Kronos Quartet, one could get the impression that (as a recent review of one European performance has it) "they're very easily classifiable; they do everything." In fact, there are plenty of things Kronos isn't inclined to do, beginning with most of the music most other quartets play. And despite various ventures into what might be called the "mainstream" twentieth-century quartet literature (Bartok, Berg, Shostakovich), Kronos's real home is in a certain kind of more recent music, music in which rhythmic energy, repetition, quasi-tonal harmonies and references to "popular" and non-Western musics are key features. Friday night's performance at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Theater found the group thoroughly in its element.

Big pieces by two leaders in musical minimalism framed the program. Steve Reich's 1999 Triple Quartet, in its West Coast premiere, was the opener. The piece can be played either by three live quartets or (as it was here) by a single quartet playing against its own pre-recorded versions of the other two parts. The three-quartet version would doubtless be fun to watch, and would probably project some details of the interaction among the quartets more clearly. In the Kronos' performance one had the sense that there was more going on between the two taped parts than the tape's stereo separation would let the ear distinguish.

But the interaction of live and recorded sound was fascinating. The live quartet, amplified (as always) and just a little louder than the two taped ones, rebounded off their energetic backdrop as though bouncing on a trampoline. The outer parts of the piece were vintage Reich--vigorous, motoric music peppered with syncopated accents, from which lyrical lines would emerge and swell. The middle section was something else again, a serene and slow counterpoint involving all of the parts. Here the piece really became richer and more interesting for being two-thirds pre-recorded. A live violin echoing and shadowing a taped violin would not have been extraordinary, but Reich does the reverse, the live instrument leading and the taped one following--and suddenly the listener (this listener, anyway) is drawn into all sorts of reflections about the scripted nature of so much music, about how musical events that are designed to sound spontaneous can be nearly as perfectly pre-determined as the unwinding of a tape. It was an uncanny moment.

The program's second half was occupied by the American premiere of Terry Riley's Requiem for Adam, a musical memorial to first violinist David Harrington's son, who died at the age of 16. Those who know Riley only by his minimalist classic In C would be startled to hear the turn his music has taken since. There is nothing minimalist about Requiem for Adam; it's more like early Lou Harrison--active, continuously shifting, earnestly contrapuntal. The first movement, "Ascending the Heaven Ladder," is built around a very simple four-note pattern that is steadily shifted upward step by step, passing from player to player amid a kaleidoscopic array of changing textures. The last, "Requiem for Adam," veers from infectious syncopation to reverie to dirge, giving no clue until the last moments where it will stop.

In between comes a movement titled "Corteje funebre en el Monte Diablo," alluding to "the actual spot," as the composer puts it in his notes, "where Adam left his physical form." The synthesized sounds accompanying the quartet, Riley says, are meant to "help establish the ritual feeling of a procession slowly moving on a ridge atop the mountain." In all fairness, by the time the movement ends the effect is there; but at the opening, the cheesy synthesized horns and percussion, jauntily syncopated, sounded like nothing so much as set-changing music for a Lloyd Webber musical. The pizzicato burlesque of the "Dies irae" that followed immediately afterward didn't help.

Kronos has a long and illustrious history of fruitful collaborations with other musicians, and the other two pieces on Friday's program featured guest soloists. Kayhan Kalhor, the world premiere of whose Gallop of a Thousand Horses followed the Reich, is a virtuoso player of the kamancheh, an Iranian instrument. It's roughly the size and shape of a violin, but played upright, like a treble viol, and has a piercing sound that seemed to be due to metal strings. He and his colleague Ziya Tabassian (playing the tombak, a small hand-drum much like an Indian tabla joined Kronos for a performance as energetic as the title would lead one to expect. Over the driving backdrop laid down by the quartet, Kalhor and Tabassian spun an increasingly urgent and intricate composite line. The piece ended in medias res (as did the Reich before it); music so predicated on sheer momentum as this has really no other way to end.

Osvaldo Golijov's Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, though, was the highlight of the evening, not so much for the Kronos Quartet's pungent accompaniment as for the extraordinary clarinet playing of guest soloist David Krakauer. Among the woodwinds, the clarinet has a justified reputation for coolness (Prokofiev knew what he was doing when, parceling out roles in Peter and the Wolf, he gave the clarinet the aloof, insouciant character of the cat). Not in Krakauer's hands though. Throughout Golijov's klezmer-flavored quintet, his clarinet sobbed, wailed, cajoled, exulted with astonishing fervor, now mimicking the human voice, now some uncanny super-instrument. (At one point, Krakauer somehow held a concert high F on the bass clarinet; it sounded like a supernaturally intense soprano sax). It was powerful music-making.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved