George Crumb’s harrowing Vietnam War composition “Black Angels: Thirteen Images From the Dark Land” whirs with the creator’s vision of “terrifying things in the air.” The Kronos Quartet added the bells and whistles: multimedia staging that brings another idea of airborne things.
Why shouldn’t the iconoclastic San Francisco-based new music quartet pluck their instruments from stage lifts? They’ve been snipping the strings of traditional chamber music repertoire since the group started in 1973, with the current lineup since 1978.
“It’s going to be the closest thing to a video in one of our concerts,” said David Harrington, first violinist.
“There are a lot of elements of staging, with sets and Chinese gongs flying in from outer space. Our instruments will be hanging in midair at one point. What we’ve done with the theatrics has been evolving. At certain moments the staging will look like bat wings, at others it might look like an angel’s wings. That comes directly out of the Vietnam War. He (Crumb) did say that there were horrible things and they found their way into `Black Angels.’ “
Kronos (Harrington, second violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud) will open its 8 p.m. Saturday show at the Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Ave., with three Chicago premieres and Hamza El Din’s “Escalay (Water Wheel).” The latter is a selection from its 1992 “Pieces of Africa” (Elektra Nonesuch), the first album to occupy the top spot on both the Billboard magazine classical music chart and the world music chart (the latter a relative newcomer). The performance is part of the JAM/Goodman New Music Series.
The 18 minute-plus “Black Angels” (written in 1970 and released by Kronos on a same-titled disc on Elektra Nonesuch in 1990) will follow intermission.
” `Black Angels’ was one of the main inspirations for me forming Kronos,” Harrington said. “The musical colors are incredibly fascinating. To play that piece I had to have a group that rehearsed every day.”
Locating the 21 crystal glasses required for the “God-music” segment was a chore in itself.
“In 1973 to even try to play `Black Angels’ we had to go to a department store and secretly whip out our bows and draw them across the tops of these wine glasses to find out what pitch they were,” Harrington said. “I remember being thrown out of more than one store.”
With a Grammy Award for best new classical composition (Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” in 1990) and 15 releases to its credit, Kronos still reaches into uncharted territories of postmodern music.
One of the new works to have its debut in Chicago, Osvaldo Golijov’s Holocaust memorial “Yiddishbbuk” serves “some very lamenting moments, yet others are incredibly joyous,” Harrington said. “It’s a very passionate music, and voices are kind of screaming out of different textures and times.”
Scott Johnson’s “The Clouds, It Raged and Lawless Things” from “How It Happens” weaves in a digitally sampled recording of the late journalist I.F. Stone.
“For many people I.F. Stone is the pre-eminent journalist of that (Vietnam War) period,” Harrington said. “The sound of his voice and the prophetic quality of what he said fits our music.”
Likewise, Michael Daugherty’s late 1992 composition “Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover” taps taped dialogue from recently declassified recordings of the late FBI director while the four strings emulate the sounds of sirens, patriotic songs and machine guns.
“I read Curt Gentry’s biography (“J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets”) and I was horrified,” Harrington said. “Gentry systematically details the most amazing fundamental breaches of our own laws that Hoover for more than 50 years was breaking.”
With 35 composers around the world writing for the quartet, “We offer sounds of places that we’re not familiar with but music allows us to get to those places,” he said.
“I know for sure that with the pieces we’ve played, whether it’s by Astor Piazzolla (“Five Tango Sensations,” Elektra Nonesuch) or Hamza El Din, these are by people that might appear on various record charts,” Harrington said. “I want to give our audience a sense of the amazing diversity of music and the vitality of what is being written and thought of.”
