When the four musicians arrive on the stage of Princeton's Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall it looks more like the beginning of a fashion show than of an evening of chamber music. First and second violins David Harrington and John Sherba are wearing padded-shoulder suits right out of L'Uomo Vogue with decorative leather patches on the elbows and knees. Violist Hank Dutt, whose blond hair is gathered at the back in a small ponytail, is no sartorial slouch either. Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, with her slightly spiked blonde hair, is wearing a black velvet top that buttons up the back and black-on-black patterned pants tapered upward from the ankles sari-style.
This is a string quartet?
It is. It's the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, which takes its name from the Greek god Cronus, who castrated his father, Uranus, and later ate his own four children, except for lucky Zeus, who escaped.
Everything about the Kronos Quartet, whose oldest member is thirty-eight, is antithetical to the traditional concept of chamber music, a term with which Kronos violently denies any association. Near the beginning of the group's decade-long career, they were joined onstage by an eight-foot ambulatory robot named Elvik during a performance of several James Brown tunes.
That is not the James Brown of string quartet fame, but the James Brown of rhythm and blues and soul.
Unlike other string quartets, Kronos limits its repertoire to music composed within the last hundred years and concentrates heavily on recently made music, much of it written expressly for them. Charles Ives is about as old-fashioned as they get. Other oldtimers in their repertoire include Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Bela Bartok, and Dmitri Shostakovitch.
Their concerts and their albums also give equal billing to jazz greats such as Thelonius Monk, Ornette, Coleman, and Bill Evans. Kronos' compact discs, including Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79111) and White Man Sleeps (Nonesuch 79613), are permanent fixtures on Billboard's classical chart.
The new album, Winter Was Hard (Nonesuch 791812), released this past fall, features music from sources as diverse as Terry Riley, John Zorn, Webern, and for Kronos, a piece that is downright conventional--Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. (Actually, the Adagio was originally written by the young Barber in 1935 as part of a string quartet, and it was Toscanini who suggested the adagio part be rethought for string orchestra.) Plans are afoot to make a film with French director Jean-Luc Godard, who approached them about making a film based on music from their albums with the Kronosites as the stars.
In the spring of 1988 they gave their first Great Performers at Lincoln Center subscription series concert. This month, the group will perform their second concert in the Lincoln Center subscription series, playing works by Charles Ives, Gyorgi Ligeti, and a new work by Tina Davidson. During their U.S. and European tours from February through May, the quartet will premiere works written for them by John Zorn, Kevin Volans, and Steve
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