Kronos Quartet in Dublin: Five Decades celebration marks the end of an era for this passionate ensemble

Kronos Quartet

National Concert Hall, Dublin

★★★★☆

Kronos Quartet played at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Sunday as part of its season-long Five Decades 50th anniversary tour. The farewell aspect of the tour is that its second violinist, John Sherba, and viola player, Hank Dutt, will retire at the end of the tour, and their places will be taken by Gabriela Diaz and Ayane Kozasa. Sherba and Dutt have been in the group for 45 and 46 years, respectively, so the celebration also marks the end of an era.

Otherwise it’s business as usual for this ensemble, which has become a touchstone in the world of new music for string quartet for the passion with which it reaches out to musicians and genres that lie beyond the classical canon.

That’s not to say that Kronos hasn’t changed over the years. It’s a while since I last heard them, and the technology they have at their disposal has developed hugely. The loudspeaker stacks now on the stage could swallow up all four players a couple of times with room to spare.

Sonically, the biggest change is in the presentation of the cello by Paul Wiancko. He became a member last year, although he had played with the group before that, and his is the instrument that is most consistently heavily processed by the sound engineers. Often it sounds less like a cello than an amalgam of cello and double bass or, sometimes, cello and bass guitar.

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The programmes differ from venue to venue on the tour. In Dublin each half of the evening began with a selection of shorter pieces, most of them with an arranger credited, followed by a single, longer work.

The opening piece, Jlin’s rhythmically choppy Little Black Book, adds a bass drum for Wiancko to its bold, primitivistic gestures. Terry Riley’s Lunch in Chinatown (from This Assortment of Atoms: One Time Only!) offers everyday restaurant chitchat between the players over mostly ruminative writing.

The issues touched on varied. Peni Candra Rini’s Segara Gunung (Ocean-Mountain) addresses nature and climate issues in her native Indonesia. And the first half’s longest piece, Nicole Lizée’s gag- and prop-rich Zonely Hearts, was inspired by Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Kronos’s leader, David Harrington, has said of this piece: “I can’t even imagine having more fun on stage.” It’s easy to see why.

For me, the best of the shorter pieces came in the second half, in Laurie Anderson’s mostly eerily, ethereally quiet but sometimes luscious Flow.

[ Kronos Quartet in Ireland: ‘Every note, every piece we play, every composer, every collaboration - everything has meaning’ ]

The concert’s major work was more than a quarter of a century old, Steve Reich’s Different Trains, a reflection on the trains of Reich’s American childhood (he was born in 1936) and the very different train journeys undertaken by Jews in wartime Europe.

The piece blends the playing of the live quartet with recorded strings, train sounds from the 1930s and 1940s, and the voices of his governess, a retired Pullman porter, and Holocaust survivors. Its musical mix of live and recorded quartets, of chugging strings and train horns, and speed changes effected with the immediacy of film edits never fails to fascinate. This performance had a rare sense of space and stilled time.

The concert’s first two encores were clearly intended as a reference to contemporary events, a haunting excerpt from the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Third String Quartet, and Tashweesh by the Palestinian group Ramallah Underground.