Kronos Quartet bids farewell and leaves the musical world a better place

It was a time of reunion, celebration and parting when the trailblazing Kronos Quartet took the stage for their farewell tour of Australia.

Kronos Quartet performing Black Angels at their farewell to Sydney Opera House. Picture: Ken Leanfore

• A double dose of banjo heaven
• Rise and shine for new stellar talent
• Cello fireworks and a light fandango
• Russian maestro gets up close and personal

It was a time of reunion, celebration and parting when the trailblazing Kronos Quartet took the beautifully lit Opera House concert hall stage for what is said to be their final tour of Australia.

Formed by David Harrington in San Francisco in 1973 – just as the Opera House was being opened – the foursome has had a rotating membership with second violin John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt in the line-up for 45 years. This tour was the first chance to see Kronos’s newest cellist Paul Wianko.

Always thinking outside the square, Harrington and his colleagues have influenced two generations of musicians and an important part of their work is to encourage and commission new music. More than 1000 works have been written for them and this tour is showcasing their latest initiative, 50 for the Future, an online learning repertoire where composers have been asked to write works and young musicians can download scores, read bios and hear a recording of Kronos performing the piece – all for free.

Four of these works started the concert – a catchy bouncing African tune by singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo; a moody and atmospheric evocation of modern-day gamelan by Javanese vocalist Peni Candra Rini; an instrumental by Canadian Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq and a surrealistic electronic work by another Canadian, Nicole Lizee.

Kronos Quartet - David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt and Paul Wianko, share a surreal moment. Picture: Ken Leanfore

This last piece involved the four players having precisely synchronised shouted phone conversations, using vocalisations and humorous props including playing their instruments with cardboard bows.

It was an evening with the eclectic mixture of music and theatre that Kronos fans have come to know and love over the years. Experimentation, inclusiveness, all done with peerless musicianship. And to top it all we got two classics in Steve Reich’s Different Trains, written for the group in 1988, and the anti-Vietnam War work that started it all, George Crumb’s Black Angels. It was after hearing this work that Harrington formed the quartet in 1973 so they could play it themselves. Both pieces are as searingly moving and relevant today as they were then.

Black Angels, subtitled “13 images from the dark land”, was written in 1970 when the Vietnam War was still raging. Crumb uses voices, percussion and bowed goblets of water among other effects to conjure up various ghostly impressions of war versus spirituality.

The ensemble is wired to amplifiers to evoke swarms of insects, “sounds of bones” and “God music”, all interspersed with musical references to Schubert’s Death And The Maiden string quartet in a ghostly chorale, as if played by distant viols, and the Dies Irae, as well as snatches of verse by Federico Garcia Lorca.

After it was over the crowd wanted one more final glimpse of their heroes and Kronos did not disappoint, with another classic from their back catalogue of 70-plus albums, Terry Riley’s One Earth, One People, One Love, featuring the taped voices of astronaut Gene Cernan and American poet Alice Walker.

It seemed the perfect way to farewell a band who have done more than most to make the world a better place.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Kronos Quartet Five Decades Tour

• WHERE Sydney Opera House

• WHEN March 14, 2023