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[MUSIC REVIEW] KRONOS QUARTET at the Colonial Theatre
10.22.06
KRONOS QUARTET
COLONIAL THEATRE
Pittsfield, Mass.
review by Seth Rogovoy, critic-at-large, Berkshire Living Magazine
(Pittsfield, Mass., October 19, 2006) -- German philosopher Theodor Adorno is reputed to have said, “After the Holocaust there can be no poetry.” And although his remark has been widely misinterpreted to mean that art is futile in the face of the worst of human calamities, it does and has always raised the very real challenge of dealing with something as monumental as the purposeful destruction of an entire race of people in a single work of art – a painting, a film, a poem.
Given its mostly purely abstract and formal qualities, music might be the art form best equipped to deal with the seemingly insurmountable challenges presented by the monstrosity of the Nazi Holocaust. And one would be hard put to find a more effective attempt at addressing the banalities and clichés of the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews than in composer Steve Reich’s landmark 1988 composition, Different Trains, written for the Kronos Quartet, and which served as the centerpiece of the group’s program at Pittsfield’s Colonial Theatre on Friday night on the occasion of Reich’s seventieth birthday.
As it happens, Different Trains is also Reich at his best – his supreme achievement, blending his masterful patterning of melody on the human voice; phasing tape loops and live musicians; using repetition of rhythm for emotional affect; and injecting very personal and autobiographical elements into his compositions, here being the contrast of his own intercontinental train trips as a young boy living a bicoastal life in the U.S. at the very same time that cattle cars were transporting Jews to death camps all over central and Eastern Europe.
And as it happens, as it was on Friday night, Different Trains also showcased the Kronos Quartet at its best – certainly at its most challenging and provocative, but also its most adventurous, working with pre-recorded tape loops and voice recordings to build a miniature symphony of sound expressing both pain and beauty while allowing for the individual musicians to add their own expression to a composition that could just be a piece of industrial music but instead winds up being the most humanist of works. Lead violinist David Harrington in particular wrung pathos out of the repeated ostinatoes that paralleled the mechanical sounds of trains that hinted at the agonies that might have been felt by those trapped inside.
But Friday night’s concert was about more than just Reich’s Different Trains. Kronos perhaps wisely paired that piece, which culminated the second half, with Tenebrae, a slow, meditative, single movement work by perhaps the hottest young composer of our time, Osvaldo Golijov, familiar to Berkshire audiences for his many works performed in recent years at Tanglewood, including this summer’s startling world premiere for Yo Yo Ma titled AZUL. In Kronos’s hands, Tenebrae was elegiac and sorrowful.
The first half of Kronos’s concert was typically eclectic, with the group flaunting its avant-garde and world-music credentials by playing numbers by downtown composer John Zorn, whose Cat o’ Nine Tails was a postmodern take on cartoon music; several numbers by Rahul Dev Burman – think of him as the John Williams of the Indian film industry, or Bollywood; and a newly discovered piece by an unknown Iraqi composer aptly titled Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me.
And if all that wasn’t cool enough, Kronos took the stage for an encore and offered a string quartet transcription of a tune by Icelandic Sigur Ros, one of the hippest rock bands in the world.
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