09 August 2010
Review: Supergroups Kronos Quartet and eighth blackbird perform at Cabrillo festival
by Richard Scheinin
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Years ago, when the Kronos Quartet was busy defining itself as a group, innovation meant playing an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." It was part of the string quartet's effort to de-snobify classical music and to create a new genre -- and today it seems like kid stuff. With its charisma and chops, its taste and unflagging sense of mission, Kronos just keeps getting better. After 30-plus years, Kronos is tops, as it showed Sunday night at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, where it shared a double bill with eighth blackbird, another, younger supergroup of contemporary music. Blackbird is a brilliant ensemble. But watching it perform prior to Kronos at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium was a bit like seeing Keith Richards warm up a crowd before Buddy Guy steps onstage to teach.
A sextet founded in 1996, blackbird -- piano, flute, clarinet, cello, violin and percussion -- emerges from the Kronos lineage with the same kind of devotion to overhauling classical music's repertory and presentation. It constantly commissions new works from composers, not necessarily ones with strict classical backgrounds. The ensemble builds collaborations with nonmusical artists (from stage directors to puppeteers), and it incorporates lighting, amplification and sound design into performances.
All of this brings classical music into closer sync with the theatrical and pop-music worlds. But what's unique to eighth blackbird is its fluid and playful choreography, the way the musicians move about the stage as they perform. It's not quite ballet, but that's the idea: to bring out a physical/visual representation of the music, as blackbird did Sunday with composer Stephen Hartke's "Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays."The piece is inspired by Asian court and theater music, and the group's motion mirrored the flow of internal conversations within the composition, with its shadowy textures, permutating instrumental combinations and subtle ritual drama. Most importantly, the performance of this and two other pieces -- "Still Life With Avalanche" by Missy Mazzoli, a New York-based composer with indie-rock affiliations; and "Catch" by Thomas Ades, the British composing titan -- was gleamingly virtuosic, with a clean, digital perfection.
Still, once Kronos (frequent Cabrillo guests, going back years) got going after intermission, blackbird (five of whose members are in the festival orchestra this year) receded in memory. Flesh-and-blood music -- very analog -- was burying art-school refinement.
New York-based composer Bryce Dessner's "Aheym" (Yiddish for "Homeward") was the warm-up, alternating the string quartet's slashed unison chords and wide-open lyricism, and building toward cinematic motion: landscapes and time whizzing past.
Next, what a contrast: Time was suspended in a sensuous performance of Ram Narayan's "Raga Mishra Bhairavi: Alap," Kronos' arrangement of a recording by the Indian master of the sarangi, a bowed string instrument known for its ability to imitate the human voice.
The sarangi solo (transcribed for Kronos by composer Lev Zhurbin, known as Ljova) was given to violist Hank Dutt: slow and long-lined, gradually growing florid over the rest of the group's pungent drone. The whole performance -- and Dutt's solo, in particular -- was filled with voluptuous color and heart. "That should put an end to viola jokes," quipped first violinist David Harrington, when it was over.
Earthy yet rarefied -- like the blues, like Buddy Guy's guitar -- Kronos was showing what a veteran ensemble can do. (Its young cellist, Jeffrey Zeigler -- a relatively recent addition to the group -- fits right in).
On Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov's " "... hold me, neighbor, in this storm "...," the group played like a village string band fueled by vodka or thick Turkish coffee.
It interacted with prerecorded representations of the Serbian ethnic landscape: Eastern Orthodox church bells, Serbian folk chants, Islamic prayer calls. But this isn't a politically correct piece. It's beautifully disquieting -- one senses the bumping and grating of side-by-side communities -- and Kronos played it with blood-red zeal.
The Cabrillo Festival continues through Aug. 15: www.cabrillomusic.org.
