Kronos 25: Discs 9/10

Disc 9 is devoted to the music of Alfred Schnittke, a Russian/Jewish composer born in the Soviet Union. His father was posted to Vienna and so the young composer began his education exposed to the musical traditions of Viennese classicism which influenced his later work. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he taught from 1962 to 1972. He is sometimes regarded as an heir to Shostakovich because of the extremes of parody and despair in his music. Like Shostakovich he tends to quote stylistic elements if not literally from historical pieces. He was plagued by ill-health much of his life. Kronos play the Second and Fourth Quartets as well as their own transcription from the Concerto for Mixed Choir. This is some of the most challenging music in the whole collection and in many ways it reminds me of the very late works of Shostakovich in its bleak intensity.

You might think of Disc 10 as the "post-colonial" disc as it contains music by Australian Peter Sculthorpe, Vietnamese P. Q. Phan and South African Kevin Volans. I know some of this music as it was on a Kronos album I bought in the 80s with music by Sculthorpe and Volans. Both composers were very influenced by the indigenous music of their countries as was Phan. On one of the pieces by Sculthorpe, he adds two didgeridoos, instruments native to the Australian aborigines, to the quartet. But for the most part the influences are in the area of rhythmic ideas.

For our envoi, here is Kronos with a movement from the Volans piece White Man Sleeps.

What I really miss from this collection is their absolutely best ever string quartet encore, their transcription of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze"

Summary? This is a pretty good cross-section of the four hundred-some works commissioned by Kronos, certainly the most adventurous and prolific string quartet active today and the model for many other young string quartets. Is there any truly great music here? There is some very good music by the usual suspects: John Adams, Arvo Pärt, Morton Feldman and Steve Reich, and there is some interesting music by most of the other composers. What was valuable to me in listening to these ten discs is to get a sort of overview of what is going on with the string quartet these days. What I didn't hear too often was structurally interesting music. There sure were a lot of interesting surface textures, though. There was nothing coming up to the level of quartets by the Viennese masters (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, but also Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), or Bartók or Shostakovich.