Kronos Makes Good on Its Mission

When the Kronos Quartet first started playing in 1973, the Bay Area-based group began with a mission: to explore new horizons and expand the repertoire of string-quartet music by commissioning new pieces.

Years later, Kronos is the closest thing to a household name among string quartets, and its operation is not like any other. The group’s unorthodox approach to music, as well as to staging and attire, has earned its members admiration and quiet scorn--perhaps flecked with envy--among more staid elements in classical music.

A constant in the Kronos ethos has been the sense of moving forward. There are always new pieces under construction, in various parts of the world, and new ideas being nurtured from within the Kronos camp.

“There are about 44 new pieces being written for us right now, so we’re sort of going in that many directions. Whether it’s forward or outward or circular or Moebius-strip-like, I don’t know,” said first violinist David Harrington in a phone interview from Kronos headquarters in San Francisco. Still, Harrington said, “things seem to be related. That’s what I notice as time goes on. It feels like it’s all part of a musical world.”

This week the quartet performs three concerts in the Los Angeles area. The performers kicked off in Orange County, then moved north, and will arrive for a debut at Glendale’s Alex Theatre on Friday night.

The quartet’s mantra seems to be coherent eclecticism. On the Alex program will be a new piece, String Quartet No. 3 by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, and the quartet was ironing out kinks only last week.

Kronos will also perform an arrangement of a prepared piano piece from the ‘40s by John Cage and arrangements of medieval music by Guillaume de Machaut and mystic female composer Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179).

Terry Riley’s “Cadenza on the Night Plain,” one of many works the proto-Minimalist composer has written for Kronos, will take up the second half.

This old-meets-new approach is not new for Kronos. As much as the group thrives on ink-still-wet scores, it maintains a broad view of music.

Harrington pointed out the common elements between seemingly new pieces and older inspirations, including Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s “First String Quartet,” for which the source material is a 14th century Polish hymn.

“Recently we played that piece in combination with music of Hildegard von Bingen and Arvo Part and others,” he said. “John Cage’s ‘Totem Ancestor’ is from the ‘40s, and to me it sounds mythic and timeless, ancient as well as modern. I’m finding that the music I like the most has that quality,” said Harrington.

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Recordings have played a key role in the quartet’s work and public presence. The Kronos section of your local music store probably includes such popular titles as 1992’s “Pieces of Africa,” the closest thing to a feel-good album they’ve put out. More cerebral efforts include 1994’s “Night Prayers” and the hauntingly spare music of Morton Feldman.

Kronos recently released both “Howl USA,” featuring a musical treatment of the notorious Allen Ginsberg poem and other spoken word-related pieces, and a double CD entitled “Released 1985-1995,” a compilation of pieces recorded during the group’s 10-year, fruitful association with the Nonesuch label.

Next up on the recording front will be two separate titles released in March: Chinese-born composer Tan Dun’s fascinating “Ghost Opera” and “The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind,” by Osvaldo Golijov.

As healthy as the Kronos machinery has been in recent years, this has also been an emotionally trying time for the members. In a short period two years ago, death took cellist Joan Jeanrenaud’s child, violist Hank Dutt’s partner, and Harrington’s 16-year-old son, who had a fatal heart attack.

Since that tragedy, Harrington said, “the whole world sounds different. For me, it’s been 21 months, almost to the day, since my son died. Some moments, it feels like it happened 30 seconds ago. The whole way that music itself deals with time and deals with things has changed.

“What I’ve come to learn is just how wonderful and how elegant music is in terms of being able to refer to life and to the past and to the future. I don’t know of anything else like it. I’m finding an appreciation for musical reality.”

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And the realities of life are finding their way into Kronos music. “A lot of the composers that are writing for us have been very influenced by these events,” Harrington said. “For instance, the opening piece on the program at the Alex Theatre, “Tragedy at the Opera,” by Vietnamese composer P.Q. Phan, “is a direct result of a conversation that he and I had after my son died. We were just talking about cataclysmic types of events.”

Phan recalled seeing an opera in his homeland as a child 20 years ago, in which the male lead died of a heart attack just after hitting a high note. “That’s basically what happened to my son, on Easter Sunday 1995 on top of Mount Diablo” outside of San Francisco, said Harrington.

“It was just the most shocking thing that could have happened on a beautiful day on top of a mountain. That reality then got filtered through Phan’s past and his reality and came out in this piece,” Harrington said.

Riley is working on a piece in memoriam for the departed loved ones of the Kronos world, and Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s new string quartet takes into account the grief within Kronos’ ranks.

But the quartet’s musical saga continues apace, as an extension of the original impulse that drew the members together. “The world of music feels very different to me in January of 1997 than it did in September of 1973,” Harrington said.

“Practically everything that we do was inconceivable way back when I had no idea that in 1997 there would be music by a Vietnamese composer and a Latvian composer and Terry Riley.

“But, for me, everything that we’ve ever done is the result of every other thing that we’ve done. Just wanting to set in motion the world of quartets as it seems at any point, that’s what is important for us.”

DETAILS

* WHAT: Kronos Quartet.

* WHERE: Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday.

* HOW MUCH: $22.50 and $29.50.

* CALL: (800) 233-3123.