Kronos Quartet, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Reaching around the world

Arts Editor

Monday 16 May 2011

The coach trip to Hamilton Mausoleum that kicked off this weekend's Glasgow residency by America's frontier-busting Kronos quartet was not just a chance to hear a wide range of music in the resonance of the venue's remarkable acoustic, but also an opportunity to taste the programme's breadth of collaboration.

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Keith Bruce

The string quartet themselves were less than half the story and the music that worked best with the 10-second echo in the Duke of Hamilton’s resting place was the simple folk minimalism of Finn Ritva Koistinen on her dulcimer-like plucked kantele and Canadian singer Tanya Tagaq building layers of Inuit incantation within a circle of candles.

The global reach of the curiosity of the Kronos was the theme of the group’s opening concert too, with leader David Harrington’s flatteringly inclusive humorous introductions embracing the concepts of Palestinian club culture and Egyptian tango by the time we reached the encores. The meat of the programme was American, and the biggest work Steve Reich’s remarkable multi-layered response to 9/11, WTC. It uses recordings of testimonies from the attack on the World Trade Centre as the structure of the score for the musicians in a way that technology has made possible since he wrote Different Trains for the Kronos, a piece it consciously echoes.If the politics of the Reich piece were movingly personal, Jon Rose’s Music from 4 Fences, which saw the quartet abandon their conventional instruments to bow and pluck strings stretched on metal frames, was much more theatrically explicit about challenging boundaries. That a string snapped during the performance seemed all too appropriate.That work, and a beautiful arrangement of Flugufrelsarinn, an early piece by Icelandic rock group Sigur Ros, were the only ones that did not feature the human voice in some way, but the unique contributions to this sequence of Scottish premieres did not come pre-recorded.Terry Riley’s Another Secret eQuation and Michael Gordon’s Exalted both teamed the quartet with 25 singers from the National Youth Choir of Scotland in the latest of what has become an astonishing series appearances by Christopher Bell’s young performers. The latter, featuring Gordon’s characteristic motorik pulse and colourcoded like all the Bang on a Can composer’s work, this one “yellow”, used a line from the Kaddish in Aramaic and required precise glissandos and syncopation as the text ping-ponged between the female and male voices. Gordon’s illustrious predecessor Riley, whose In C is one of the iconic works of the last century, has written nothing lovelier than this recent piece, with its algebraically startling exchanges between choir and players and text that mixes onomatopoeia with youthful inquiries about the state of the universe.It was a huge challenge, to which NYCoS rose superbly as no other vocal ensemble in Scotland, never mind youth choir in the UK, could have done.HHHHH

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Kronos Quartet, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Reaching around the world

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