Kronos Quartet: Music by Sculthorpe, Sallinen, Glass, Nancarrow, Hendrix

Probably one of the first ten or so CDs I owned, certainly the first by a string quartet, and one of the earliest examples of that metropolitan sophisticat branch of "crossover" music. These days I'm very wary of that branch — in which I include, unfairly because I don't know much of his stuff, Nitin Sawhney. As though mixing things up, particularly the sheen of high culture with the "edge" of pop culture, was inherently progressive, even when done for no purpose beyond… showing that things can be mixed up. It wants to have its cake and eat it too. So you've arranged Jimi Hendrix for a string quartet? Big fucking whoop!

Of course, when I saw the Kronos Quartet play at The Leadmill a couple of years after I got this CD, I was hoping they'd play Purple Haze. And they did, as an encore.

Thus I was part of that first intake of the rock audience into contemporary classical music. And Kronos were the first quartet I was aware of to get their name on the marquee.

Even after all these years, we can't work out how to organise the credits for classical recordings in the ID3 tags of our MP3s. What goes in the "artist" field? The performers or the composers? In most cases, it's the composer, like Janáček or Smetana. But here it's Kronos. Well done, them. Building the brand, and all that.

I haven't listened to this CD for what seems like decades, and quite possibly is. All the above baggage falls away now, and it's much easier to hear it just as music. The Aulis Sallinen piece, Some Aspects of Peltoniemi Hintrik's Funeral March, jumps out. Never heard of Sallinen before or since, as far as I can remember, but this piece has all sorts of twists and turns, including unexpected bursts of beautiful melody. I remember thinking Philip Glass's Company was disappointingly conservative at the time, but a quarter of a century later we know how Glass turned out, so the disappointment is behind us, and Company is quite pretty.

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Comments

[Brian]

Dammit have you never had questionable tastes! :-)

[David]

Yes, indeed!