Amplifying the Mystery of Kronos

The audience at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Wednesday had a few questions for the Kronos Quartet, as listeners usually do after one of the ensemble’s radically eclectic programs. So the members of the string quartet came out on stage after their performance to answer them.

Among other things, violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud explained why they use amplifiers: It helps enhance small instrumental effects in a large hall and also allows them to monkey with acoustics either to achieve a specific quality for a given work or simply to help out in a bad space.

The quartet members also tried to explain why they run one piece into the next, while keeping the hall so dark that it’s impossible to make out the composer’s name on the program, let alone the rest of the notes. That was harder. The idea, they said, is to discover music without prejudice.

“You know,” Harrington finally concluded, “sometimes words can get in the way.”

Indeed they can. The exact effect made by these players and their musical choices is difficult to articulate. Where, when faced with a program like the one on Wednesday, to even begin?

The first piece, “Tragedy at the Opera,” by a young Vietnamese American composer, P.Q. Phan, was full of the sounds of Asia and its sensibility. The extraordinary event of the title is one the composer remembered from a childhood visit to his native court opera, when a male singer, traditionally singing a female role, reached so hard for a high note he died on the spot.

Next came Ben Johnston’s “Amazing Grace” (1973), a beautiful and soulful series of variations on the American hymn that wander into exotic pitches and rhythms. After that came “Psalom,” a tiny example of Estonian Arvo Part’s mystical, eerie postmodern return to archaic music. Then an arrangement by Kronos of real old music, “Kyrie I, II & III” from Guillaume de Machaut’s 14th century “Messe de Nostre Dame.”

With hardly a break, a transcription of John Cage’s “Totem Ancestor,” a bouncy two-minute piece from 1943 for prepared piano, followed. And finally a new string quartet by Peteris Vasks, his third. Vasks is an exciting Latvian composer who also has a mystical bent but whose music tends to be more aggressive and modernist than some of the other Eastern Europeans minimalists.

This is music that has little in common in sound, intent, geography or history. Yet there was no confusion. One piece didn’t jostle another. Somehow it all made sense; the ear didn’t need to know or connect the composer, the year, the country or the century of the music.

*

Just how well the ear can connect the seemingly disparate became even more clear after intermission, when Kronos turned to one of its specialties, Steve Reich’s poignant and painfully illuminating essay on cultural extremes, “Different Trains.”

Reich’s string quartet, written for Kronos nine years ago, recalls how the composer as a child was shuttled by train between divorced parents in Los Angeles and New York during World War II. Reich imagines the train trips Jews in Germany were taking at the same time, by electronically transforming the recorded voices of his governess, a train conductor and Holocaust survivors into musical phrases. The live string quartet--which performs to a tape of the voices and prerecorded musical lines--mimics the voices of the speakers.

This sounds complicated and the music is, too, on a contrapuntal level. But on a dramatic level, it is plain as day and night. The musical style is single-minded: One kind of music for different voices as well as different experiences, a music that captures the effect of a moving train and the pain in a Holocaust survivor’s intonation, and which has buried in it answers to why things are the way they are.

The Kronos Quartet, too, seems on its way to unraveling those mysteries. Though constricted by prerecorded tape, the ensemble has found a new freedom in its performance of “Different Trains,” each player now sounding in direct dialogue with the voices on the tape and with history.

* Kronos Quartet substitutes Terry Riley’s “Cadenza on the Night Plain” for Reich’s “Different Trains,” but otherwise performs the same program today, 8 p.m., at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, $22.50-$29.50. (800) 233-3123.