Concert
Kronos Quartet
Argotti Gardens

The concert given by the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet was surely one of the highlights of this year’s Malta Arts Festival. Founded in 1973 by violinist David Harrington, Kronos has collaborated with major contemporary composers and premiered over 700 works. It was one of the first classical ensembles to venture into world music with highly-regarded releases such as Nuevo, Caravan and the seminal Pieces of Africa. This genre-bending group has also recorded covers of songs by Bill Evans, Jimi Hendrix and Sigur Ros and performed on soundtracks of acclaimed movies.

The title of the concert – Around the World with Kronos – reflected the diverse nationalities and ethnic inspirations of the featured composers.

It could also have been symbolic – most of the works explored new expressive possibilities for the traditional classical quartet formation. The instruments, amplified throughout, were often augmented by pre-recorded sounds, drumbeats and electronic effects. A case in point was the opening work, Aviya Kopelman’s Widows & Lovers.

It started with background crowd noise out of which insistent rhythmic and melodic ideas gradually emerged. The second movement – Lovers – evoked a tender blues-in-the-night atmosphere, with Jeffrey Ziegler’s cello providing jazz-like pizzicato figurations. Black Widow, improbably inspired by the eponymous cannibalistic spider, alternated visceral ferocity with elegiac passages in which the quartet sounded like a latter-day viol consort. This was a substantial, engaging work which attests to the Kronos’s knack of identifying striking new composers.

The next work was Nicole Lizee’s Death to Kosmische, the reference being to the 1970s kosmische style of electronic music. The piece made extensive use of purposely outmoded sound effects, some of which were produced by onstage “primitive” electronic equipment. The resulting pings, twangs and echoes made the strings sound as if they were navigating through a vintage sci-fi soundscape.

After these aurally challenging works, Kronos regaled the large and mostly enthusiastic audience with idiomatic renderings of the Greek traditional piece Symyrneiko Minore and Egyptian composer’s Midhat Assem’s love song Ya Habibi Ta’ala. The ethnic connection persisted with an arrangement of Ramallah Underground’s electronica miniature Tashweesh. I was captivated by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s Oasis, whose eerie pizzicatos and fiendish harmonics were tackled by the musicians with deceptive ease. The impact of the piece was heightened by judicious use of electronics and lighting effects.

The only work not to be accompanied by a pre-recorded track was Bryce Dessner’s Aheym. Kronos gave it an energetic, punchy performance which had parts of the audience whooping in appreciation.

This notwithstanding, it was possibly the most nondescript work of the evening, its brand of minimalist quartet-as-rock-band sound having already been tried, to greater effect, before.

In contrast, Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11, composed for Kronos and premiered earlier this year as part of the composer’s 75th birthday celebrations, showed a veteran minimalist at the height of his powers. Written for three string quartets (one live and two pre-recorded) and a speech track, this piece starts with the ominous sound of a telephone off the hook and the voice of the air controller who, on that fateful September 11, noticed the first hijacked aeroplane veering off course. Further recorded voices follow and, in typical Reich fashion, the speech rhythms and contours are picked up by the strings and tossed around in nervy, hectic phrases. In the final movement solace is provided by the chant of a Hebrew cantor, before the return of that haunting, opening tone. This was a near-perfect performance of a gripping, emotional work.

As an encore, Kronos chose Omar Souleyman’s song I’ll Prevent the Hunters from Hunting You, announced by David Harrington with a knowing smile. Its Middle-Eastern strains dissipating into the summer night brought to close an excitingly different and memorable concert.