2024-01-08 05:17:00
For the quartet’s 50th anniversary, the eternal pioneer celebrates diversity and pedagogy during concerts in Paris and Lyon.
The year is 1973, shortly after midnight. The Vietnam War rages and Nixon brazenly lies to America when violinist David Harrington comes across Black Angels, George Crumb’s electrified quartet, on the radio. At the age of 24, he has just discovered his vocation: to research and share, with his compatriots and soon the planet, the musical creation of his time. Fifty years later, the Kronos Quartet that he founded in Seattle and which has been based in San Francisco since 1977 is still not the best in Beethoven and Schubert; there are the Prazak, the Takács and the Talich for that. But it is the most original, by its repertoire and by its policy of commissioning a good thousand pieces from American, African, Chinese, Swedish, Iranian, Lebanese, Indian composers… for the most part unknown to the public.
After playing in the streets, churches, high schools, museums and ferries, the Kronos have become an institution which today performs in prestigious venues, such as Carnegie Hall in New York, and whose recordings, at starting with that of Different Trains that Steve Reich composed for them, have obtained many international awards including three grammy awards. If violist Hank Dutt has been faithful to the position since 1977, David Harrington has had to replace his second violin and cellist on several occasions, but has never lost faith in youth or in the future, even when fate cruelly stole a son.
While he could be content to play works by Moondog and Michael Gordon, material from the last two albums of his quartet, or those recorded for the soundtracks of Heat by Michael Mann or Requiem For A Dream by Darren Aronofsky, he has wanted this fiftieth anniversary to celebrate diversity and pedagogy. First of all by putting online, under the title “50 for the Future”, fifty works commissioned and performed by the ensemble, with the corresponding sound files and scores. Then by giving them during a world tour which passes, in France, by the Philharmonie de Paris, whose Kronos will open the eleventh Biennial of string quartets with concerts and public masterclasses, before joining the Auditorium of Lyon.
Opportunity to rehear important milestones in their history, signed George Crumb, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Krzysztof Penderecki but also to discover arrangements of compositions by Angélique Kidjo, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, Sun Ra, as well as the French creations of pieces by Mariana Sadovska, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Trey Spruance, and Gabriella Smith, “the Mozarts, the Schuberts and the Hendrixes of tomorrow”, as this tireless trailblazer likes to think.
David Harrington and the Kronos quartet. Friday January 12 and Saturday January 13 at the Philharmonie de Paris and Saturday January 20 at the Auditorium de Lyon.
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