Kronos Festival 2025 at SFJAZZ Center

Kronos Quartet
Kronos Festival 2025
SFJAZZ Center
San Francisco, CA
April 25-27, 2025

In August of 1973, Seattle-based violinist David Harrington listened to composer George Crumb's Black Angels for the first time on a radio program, This initial encounter with an amplified string quartet inspired him to found Kronos Quartet. Following a move to San Francisco, Kronos struggled to gain traction before being offered a two-year residency at Mills College in Oakland. There they met Terry Riley, who they persuaded to write scores for them, and 2025's festival was called Good Medicine in his honor, following the theme that healing music is a necessity for our planet. Under Harrington's dedicated tutelage over the decades, Kronos has grown into a major arts organization, producing a prodigious number of albums. The work of Kronos has been unique and distinctive, covering a vast range of contemporary and ethnic sounds while showcasing unusual instruments, and frequently incorporating spoken word and sampled elements. Many of these pieces redefine and shatter boundaries—challenging conventional expectations of what people have come to expect from a string quartet.

The 2025 Festival featured the West Coast stage premiere of artists violinist Gabriela Diaz and violist Ayane Kozasa. (Previous long-term members, Hank Dutt and John Sherba retired in 2024.) In addition to their characteristic playing, which might include plucking strings; adding other instruments (current or recently designed) to the mix; and using their instrument to percussive effect, Kronos is known as well for incorporating video, sound snippets and background singers in their presented compositions. Each quartet performer took a turn with introductions.

Harrington began bowing as Riley's "Good Medicine" from Salome Dances for Peace began. Then, Díaz and cellist Paul Wiancko joined in. The next piece was cellist and film composer Hildur Guðnadóttir's "Folk Faer Andlit" ("People Get Faces"), a composition written in response to the abusive mistreatment doled out to refugees by her government in her native Iceland in 2015, when an Albanian family were deported. The fact that their child was suffering from a terminal illness served as no deterrence. The tune featured breathtaking imagery of her native land,

Next was the world premiere of a haunting new arrangement of Dr. Peni Candra Rini's lovely "Hujan" ("Rain"), a composition from her 2023 Segara Gunung (Ocean-Mountain) suite. It reflected its Indonesian roots and incorporated some knocking by Wiancko on his viola, as well as some finger plucking by the entire ensemble. While Indonesian cultures have traditionally respected the sea and mountains, Rini writes in program notes that "the traditional respect and reverence...has eroded in my country—in your country—pushed aside by greed. Mountains become the backdrop for tourist photos and tourism erodes the environment. Waters are rising, washing villages into the sea. Ultimately, we must remember that mother earth will clean house: burning us up and washing us clean."

A brisk version of the Trinidadian "A Shout" was followed by musicologist and haegeum master Soo Yeon Lyuh's three-movement 2025 suite Sumbisori (Sound of Resilience). Spectacular monochrome images from Jeju Island's remarkable female divers (who use no tanks) were projected and supplemented by those of breathtaking landscapes. Lyuh's strong, haunting vocals were augmented by the quartet along with sound samples from Jeju women she interviewed. The title Sumbisori refers to the gasp that divers exhale when they resurface, after holding their breath for up to two minutes.

Following the intermission, Alexandra Vrebalov's "Cardinal Directions," a piece concerning the destruction caused by conflict in the former Yugoslovia, was paired with Vietnamese multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Võ in order to commemorate the 50th-year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Võ employed traditional Vietnamese instruments, such as long cylindrical drums with mallets and the dàn tranh. Díaz bowed tuned water crystal glasses. Quartet members also utilized Hangs, a recently invented circular percussion instrument.

Environmental composer Gabriella Smith introduced the 35-minute five-part Keep Going, which saw the quartet bowing their instruments with pine cones, branches and other such natural objects, while Smith's field recordings played in the background. As Smith put it in program notes, it "features recordings of people I interviewed who are working on climate solutions in a wide range of fields, including ecosystem restoration, renewable energy, regenerative farming, bicycle infrastructure, policy, composting, architecture, medicine, plastic pollution, environmental justice, education, and more."

A haunting version of folk-rock singer-songwriter Neil Young's "Ohio," which commemorated the Kent State Massacre, ended the stellar evening.

Saturday night began with Jacob Garchik's arrangement version of Sun Ra's "Outer Spaceways, Inc.," which featured vocals from Georgia Anne Muldrow. Then it was time for a rendition of the meditative "Next Week's Trees" by Viet Cuong.

A variety of medium-sized anthropomorphic clay instruments were improvised with by the quartet forinti figgis-vizueta's  "clay songs." As vizueta put it in the notes, "I imagined a past where ceramic melodies grew into mountain choruses and all the broken and surviving objects from pre-colonial eras, landscapes, and cultures sounded together. The whistling jar replicas for Kronos provide the means to communicate and harmonize with these pasts, experiment and explore new sonic worlds, and, hopefully, glimpse new futures."

Nina Simone's recording of "For All We Know" (Bethlehem Records, 1959), in an arrangement by Jacob Garchik, was then featured. "Ya Taali'een 'ala el-Jabal,'" with a recorded vocal by the late Palestinian artist Rim Banna (who died of breast cancer, tragically, at age 51) followed. Then, essayist Ariel Aberg-Riger presented her work about Rachel Carson, as the quartet playing "Water Wheel," the first composition Hamza El Din wrote for Kronos, in the background.

It was then time for Benedicte Maurseth's and Kristine Tjøgersen's seven-part suite Elja, which is inspired by the vast open landscape of southern Norway's Hardangervidda plateau, with its myriad of wild species. For this performance, the quartet spent a week in Norway and had their exceedingly beautiful uncommon instruments, complete with their mother-of-pearl inlays, custom-built by renowned Norwegian luthier Ottar Kåsae. Maurseth joined them on Hardanger violin, for this extended performance.

Sunday afternoon, the finale, brought Nicole Lizée's "Death to Kosmische" to the stage, featuring the archaic electronic instruments the Stylophone and the Omnichord. Díaz took the lead on violin, and they each took turns with the instruments, which Harrington described as being "crazy and fun stuff."

Then, Navajo violinist Laura Ortman took the stage, with both the indigenous violin and her regular violin in hand, for the five-part Scended Sparks. Deep cello tonalities and a projected background of wind blowing across sand dunes enhanced the piece.

Mary Kouyoumdjian's Bombs of Beirut has evolved from her life experience. Kouyoumdjian—who has studied with jazz pianist and opera composer Anthony Davis —composed this piece, the fifth commission the Kronos: Under 30 Project offered. The piece melded the voices of the victimized with the sounds of warfare.

Kronos violinist Díaz told the American Composer's Forum that "Mary's piece highlights the human experience of living through wartime, bringing her loved ones' stories to life through their words and her own powerful music. I couldn't help but think of my own father, who was a child during the Spanish Civil War, fled to Chile, and later fled Chile during the difficult political climate there. His stories of living though wartime have absolutely shaped how I see the world. The horrors of war and the dangers of power are terrifying, but alongside those awful aspects of humanity there were always people looking to help in whatever way they could."

As the composer explained it: "Inspired by loved ones who grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, it is my hope that Bombs of Beirut provides a sonic picture of what day-to-day life is like in a turbulent Middle East—not filtered through the news and media, but through the real words of real people. The prerecorded backing track includes interviews with family and friends who shared their various experiences living in a time of war; it also presents sound documentation of bombings and attacks on civilians tape-recorded on an apartment balcony between 1976—1978."

Next, Zachary James Watkins' "Peace Be Til" interwove an interview he conducted in San Francisco with Dr. King's personal lawyer and speechwriter Dr. Clarence B. Jones, together with the quartet and samples by Mahalia Jackson, with, to create what Watkins terms "high vibration resonance."

Last but not least was Richmond, California resident Tsering Wangmo Satho. Satho ,who grew up in a Tibetan refugee camp in India, co-founded Chaksam-pa, a Tibetan dance and opera troupe where she serves as artistic director. The National Endowment for the Arts named her as one of 2022's National Heritage Fellows, noting that her "impact as a Tibetan traditional artist is felt across the diaspora and illuminates the beauty and power of Tibetan arts and culture on an international scale."

As she took the stage with her 40-strong girls choir to perform her Wisdom Eyes suite, Harrington sang Satho's praises to the rafters. Kronos used all manner of bowing and percussive techniques, including shattering their bows against the instrument. It proved to be a dramatic end to an adventurous three days of musical performances.

Comments