You've got to hand it to the Kronos Quartet. Over the past ten years, the group has not only shown that it's possible to be hip and be a string quartet, but that a quartet need not restrict itself to Mozart and Beethoven. Armed with trendy clothes and haircuts, Kronos has fearlessly commissioned an entire repertory of new music from around the globe. Some of that music found its way onto the last Kronos disc – a revelatory multicultural experiment, Pieces of Africa – and some of it finds its way onto Kronos's latest CD, Short Stories.
The Lower East Side new-music scene is represented by Elliott Sharp's "Digital" – an entirely percussive work that treats the instruments as wooden boxes – and John Zorn's "Cat o' Nine Tails," an incoherent pastiche of everything from tango and country to classical quotes and angular modernism. The blues great Willie Dixon is represented by "Spoonful," in a strident, funky arrangement by guitarist Steve Mackey. Mackey reappears in his piece for electric guitar and quartet, "Physical Property," which avoids power riffs in favor of an elegant blending of the five stringed instruments. Scott Johnson, in "Soliloquy," samples the voice of I.F. Stone and uses its rhythmic properties to suggest the quartet's melodic lines.
And there's more: the pioneering American experimentalist Henry Cowell's "Quartet Euphometric" (1919), the Soviet composer Sofia Gubaidulina's intensely coloristic "Quartet No. 2," the dense wall of sound of John Oswald's "Spectre" and Pandit Pran Nath's "Aba Kee Tayk Hamaree," which uses the quartet merely to sustain a drone behind his vocal improvisations.
All this diversity is as much a problem as a pleasure. There are too many tantalizing bonbons but not a single substantial work, no focus around which the other pieces can revolve. It's like a lot of encores minus the symphony. The Kronos Quartet plays with its characteristic intensity, and its lean, acidic sonority is well matched to this repertory. But, at least on this CD, the repertory itself seems insubstantial. (RS 658)
K. ROBERT SCHWARZ
