Music Review : Kronos Quartet in Recent Works at UCLA

Connoisseurs, academics, trend-makers and young people aspiring to these roles again filled Schoenberg Auditorium at UCLA on Friday night, when the Kronos Quartet returned for another program of discovery. This time, the discoveries were genuine.

Kronos has sometimes flirted with lightweight composers. Friday, on a program of five works, four of which were written recently on commissions for the San Francisco-based ensemble, real seriousness took the spotlight.

The world-premiere performance of Reza Vali’s ear-opening “Persian Folklore”--actually, the Iranian composer’s first string quartet--dominated this event, as a lion dominates a landscape of zebras.

Urgent, cogent and tautly dramatic, this folk-music-inspired (though mostly aggressively atonal) work moves fiercely through a single, continuous movement with bracing concentration. The composer, who was born in 1952 and now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, was present to share applause with violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.

Henryk Gorecki’s engrossing “Already It Is Dusk”--another first quartet, though not so named--again reveals the paucity of description in the term minimalist. “Already” may utilize materials identified with that school, but with an originality and personality utterly separate from others so labeled.

Worthy and intriguing pieces by Hirokazu Hiraishi, Tina Davidson and Kevin Volans completed the program.