Kronos Quartet LONG TIME PASSING

LONG TIME PASSING

 

Kronos Quartet TERRY RILEY Sun Rings

Commissioned by NASA for the Kronos Quartet and featuring pre-recorded sounds from the plasma around planets, Terry Riley’s Sun Rings is about as close an experience to being in space as it is possible to be. The ten-movement ‘spacescape’, as Riley refers to it, is a multimedia work for quartet and chorus, opening with recorded audio of the static heard from radio emissions in space. These are all triggered by members of the quartet’s hand movements over sensors.

Kronos Quartet MUSIC OF VLADIMIR MARTYNOV

Nonesuch Records releases Kronos Quartet’s Music of Vladimir Martynov on January 10, 2012. The album includes three works written or rescored for Kronos by the contemporary Russian composer Vladimir Martynov: The Beatitudes (1998, rescored for Kronos, 2006), Schubert–Quintet (Unfinished) (2009), and Der Abschied (2006). Kronos’ artistic director and founder David Harrington says Martynov’s music “straddles various points of musical history and time; the music seems to me to reflect and absorb humanity in such a beautiful way.”

Born in Moscow in 1946, Martynov was the son of a well-known musicologist and writer. He studied music from a young age and attended the Conservatory before expanding his musical pursuits beyond the traditional classical canon and into folk songs, early music, avant-garde, rock, and electronic music. In 1979, he entered the Spiritual Academy at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, where he worked on preserving and restoring traditional Russian Orthodox chant. He returned to composition in the 1990s with a new style that combined the traditions of American minimalism with the repetitive chant of Russian Orthodoxy.

Kronos Quartet / Mahsa Vahdat / Marjan Vahdat PLACELESS

Placeless is the first collaboration between Kronos and Iranian singers Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat. Recorded in Oslo’s Kulturkirken Jakob in November 2018, the album features 14 songs composed by Mahsa Vahdat to classical poems by Hafez and Rumi and the works of contemporary Iranian poets Forough Farrokhzad, Mohammad Ibrahim Jafari and Vahdat’s husband Atabak Elyasi. Composers Sahba Aminikia, Aftab Darvishi, Jacob Garchik and Elyasi arranged the songs for string quartet.

Despite spanning a period of 800 years, even the oldest poems are still surprisingly relevant, showing how the human heart is always the same, regardless of time, place and culture. The album title Placeless references a well-known poem by Rumi from the 13th century:

I am not from the East, nor from the West
I am not from the land, nor from the sea

I am not from the world, not from beyond
My place is placelessness. My trace is tracelessness.

“This recording is a milestone for us,” says Mahsa Vahdat. “The wonderful musicians in Kronos Quartet have given our music new dimensions. Our lives are constantly changing in relation to time and place. Our home and where we belong - this is all over the globe. By performing poems from Persia’s classical era, we have been coming closer and closer to finding an organic connection between what we express in our art and the way we live.”

Commenting on the new release, Kronos’ artistic director, founder and violinist David Harrington states, “We’re always trying to learn as much as we can, and now, recording with Mahsa and Marjan, we sometimes are able to make sounds we have never before heard from our instruments.”

Trio da Kali / Kronos Quartet LADILIKAN

Kronos Quartet’s musical adventures have included an award-winning recording with Rokia Traoré, and now they return to Mali for one of their most successful collaborations to date. Trio da Kali are a young supergroup, all related to distinguished griot musicians, and the album starts with a reminder of their virtuoso skills. Hawa Diabaté’s emotional, soulful voice provides a reminder of her legendary father Kassé Mady Diabaté. She is backed on those ancient instruments, the xylophone-like balafon and bass n’goni lute, by Fodé Lassana Diabaté and Mamadou Kouyaté. Then the Quartet join in, at first with respectful playing and then with exuberant, thrilling flourishes that transform the ancient griot song Lila Bambo. Hawa had never heard of gospel music or Mahalia Jackson until persuaded to re-work God Shall Wipe All Tears Away with Bambara lyrics. The result is one of the highlights of an elegant, exquisite set. (Robin Denselow / The Guardian)

Kronos Quartet MICHAEL GORDON Clouded Yellow

Over the course of a decade, Bang on a Can founding composer Michael Gordon has collaborated with the world-renowned Kronos Quartet on a series of provocative works that have sought to stretch, bend and otherwise reshape the boundaries of modern classical music. Clouded Yellow assembles these works for the first time, perfectly encapsulating the breadth and complexity of this long-standing creative partnership. For the past thirty years, Michael Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio. Transcending categorization, the music represents the collision of mysterious introspection and brutal directness. Gordon’s music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, “the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.”

RICHARD REED PARRY Music for Heart and Breath

Music for Heart and Breath is a series of compositions that use involuntarily moving organs of the human body (specifically the lungs and the heart) as performance parameters. There are no time signatures: the tempos and rhythms are always governed by either the heart rates or the breathing rates of the individual players. In the case of the latter, the performers are instructed to play directly in sync with their own or another player’s individual breathing (playing at the speed of their inhalations, their exhalations or both). To enable the players to hear and play in sync with their own heartbeats, they wear stethoscopes and, naturally, generally play quietly. That, in combination with the natural variation between the performers’ heart rates, results in a delicate musical “pointillism”: starts and stops that are somewhat staggered, melodies that repeatedly align and then fall out of sync with the rising and falling of individual pulses.

The idea is less about “performance” in the traditional musical sense and more about attempting to translate directly into music the quiet internal rhythms of the body, using the naturally varying tempos inherent within each musician to guide and shape the dynamics of the pieces. Music for Heart and Breath requires that the performers let go of their regular approach to musical interpretation and phrasing, replacing it instead with a commitment to following the subtle rhythmic “instructions” of the body.

This kind of performing can yield a subtlety, a spaciousness and a uniquely fragile style of interplay between performers and musical score that always fluctuates and never repeats itself: each piece is a distinct, gentle collision of notes, dynamics, timing and shifting harmonies that, literally, has new life breathed into it every time it is played. (Richard Reed Parry, 2014)

Kronos Quartet / Wu Man TAN DUN Ghost Opera

A half-hour spent with Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera brings us face-to-face with the past, the present and ‘forever’ by employing, respectively, Bach and Shakespeare, a string quartet plus pipa (a pear-shaped, fretted lute) and an ensemble of water, stones, metal and paper. Wu Man plays pipa and doubles with vocals, bowed gong, tam-tam, Tibetan bells and paper. Kronos double their usual role with vocalizing, bowing a gong (watch those fillings!) and working a filled water bowl. Water is in fact the first thing we hear. Thereafter, three members of Kronos play a tender transcription of part of the Fourth Prelude from the First Book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – a leitmotiv that assumes especial poignancy in the third movement, or Third Act (there are five acts in all), where it converges with a Chinese folk-song to beautiful effect. The Fourth Act, “Metal and Stone”, a vivid study in aural perspectives and a hive of invention (some of it syncopated), transforms into the last act via a prominent gong stroke. Dun’s ethereal finale introduces a little girl’s lament for her lost parents and witnesses the gradual break-up of the Bach Prelude.
Ghost Opera was composed in 1994 and grew from an ancient tradition, where being rewarded after death is taken as read and everyone enters into dialogue with time. The libretto merges Shakespeare (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on...”), folk-song and the singing of monks, but Dun’s real mastery lies in the way he juxtaposes his ideas, delicately, dramatically, and alternating tactile sounds with the glow of Bach or the simplicity of folk-song. Some of the string writing echoes Chinese popular music (both in its compositional style and the way it is realized by Kronos), but it would be difficult to separate any one component of what is in effect a compact montage-cum-music-drama. It certainly says much for Kronos that they enter the spirit so convincingly (their vocal exclamations sound decidedly local), and the excellent recording does their efforts full justice.
Not one for every day of the week, perhaps, but an elevated form of ‘fusion’ that reaffirms the creative good sense of merging East with West.' (Gramophone)

Kronos Quartet FOLK SONGS

For more than 40 years, San Francisco's Kronos Quartet—David Harrington and John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)—has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually re-imagine the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world's most celebrated and influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts, releasing more than sixty recordings, collaborating with many of the world's most eclectic composers and performers, and commissioning more than 900 works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos is the recipient of more than 40 awards, including the Polar Music Prize and the Avery Fisher Prize. Last season, a five-year initiative, Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, began commissioning new works designed to train students and emerging professionals; the pieces are distributed online for free. Kronos has had a close relationship with Nonesuch since 1985, when the group recorded Philip Glass' soundtrack to Mishima. Nonesuch has since released forty-seven albums by Kronos, including Pieces of Africa (1992), a showcase of African-born composers; Nuevo (2002), a celebration of Mexican culture; and the 2004 Grammy winner, Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, featuring Dawn Upshaw—as well as motion picture soundtracks such as Requiem for a Dream and albums dedicated to composers including Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Henryk Gorecki, and Astor Piazzolla, among others. 

When Nonesuch Records celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2014, with festivals at London's Barbican Centre and New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Kronos Quartet joined forces with four labelmates—Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, Rhiannon Giddens, and Natalie Merchant—to perform a concert entitled Folk Songs. The group later recorded the songs, most of which are traditional with contemporary arrangements, with Doug Petty as the album's producer. (Nonesuch)

Kronos Quartet KIMMO POHJONEN - SAMULI KOSMINEN Uniko

“The Uniko composition was commissioned from us for the Kronos Quartet. It was composed over an eighteen-month period before the Uniko world premiere in Helsinki in September 2004.  Uniko is comprised of seven sections, connected thematically to the Uniko concept, the title of which is loosely connected to the concept of dreams. There are several ideas behind the creation of Uniko.

“First, we wanted to explore further the new and many possible sounds from the combination of accordion, accordion samples, strings, string samples and surround sound. This was virgin territory as far as we knew, and we were excited about what could be achieved with these combined elements.

“Second, we as a duo had many ideas for new pieces, melodies we wanted to develop in a new format such as this. The arrangements for these melodies were something we also very much wanted to do as an extension of our Kluster duo work, which involves accordion and accordion samples.

“Third, we wanted to ‘electrify’ the sound of the string quartet and explore the possibilities of manipulating it electronically with live looping, etc, expanding the scope of the quartet sound.

“Fourth, we wanted to further explore the visual part of our performances with light and video directors. The visual images are always a very important part of our concerts and we wanted to take them several steps further.

“Finally, we also wanted to try and reach a new level of emotional content with Uniko as a work of music. It was very important for us to create something stimulating and emotionally charged, to take the listener, as well as ourselves on an adventure. I hope we have succeeded in our goals. At least it has been great fun putting it together and performing it with the Kronos Quartet.” (Pohjonen and Kosminen)

Kronos Quartet plays TERRY RILEY Salome Dances for Peace

There is no string quartet that has ever been written that can compare length and diversity with Terry Riley's Salome Dances for Peace. Morton Feldman has written a longer one, but it is confined to his brilliant field of notational relationships and open tonal spaces. Riley's magnum opus, which dwarfs Beethoven's longest quartet by three, is a collection of so many different kinds of music, many of which had never been in string quartet form before and even more of which would -- or should -- never be rubbing up against one another in the same construct. Riley is a musical polymath, interested in music from all periods and cultures: there are trace elements of jazz and blues up against Indian classical music, North African Berber folk melodies, Native American ceremonial music, South American shamanistic power melodies -- and many more. The reason they are brought together in this way is for the telling of an allegorical story. In Riley's re-examining Salome's place in history, he finds a way to redeem both her and the world through her talent. Two thousand years after her original infamous dance she is summoned by the Great Spirit who sees her as the epitome of the feminine force and needs her talent to win back peace for the world, which has been stolen by dark forces. The quartet that Kronos takes on here has five movements, but within each movement are sections where the music changes to illustrate certain themes in Salome's journey to dance for peace. In the first two movements alone there are a total of 15 such sections. Some of them move through Middle Eastern desert themes and others through the Old West as portrayed by Aaron Copland. The genius in such a work is not so much in having so many ideas and putting them into one pot, but in writing transitions for a group of musicians to make them believable and seamless. In Riley's quartet, the journeying from summoning to the recessional at the end, movement is constant: action, contemplation, and meditation all take place on the move. Kronos' sense of drama and pace is inherent in everything they do and so the theater involved here (this was originally conceived of as a ballet) is not a stretch for them. But the emotional changes involved in the solemnity of the cause -- which Riley's mythical undertaking takes absolutely seriously -- that move from great seriousness to righteous anger to being in awe of the Divine and the urge to give in to various temptations are all illustrated by rhythmic, tonal, and timbral changes within the score. Modes shift from interval to interval without seam, hesitation, or mindless transition. Riley takes all of the musical ideas he holds dear, places them in the context of all the world's musical styles he holds sacred, and then creates for them an allegory that has lasting implications for how people view not only history and their role in the present, but how they conduct their view of the world around them forever more. That this is done without a lyric or being autodidactic is a small miracle. That he and the Kronos Quartet have produced a string quartet at the end of the twentieth century that stands as one of the most sophisticated and musically challenging in the history of Western music is an enigma. (Thom Jurek)

Kronos Quartet TERRY RILEY Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector

In honor of groundbreaking American composer Terry Riley’s 80th birthday, Nonesuch Records releases One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley—a five-disc box set of four albums of his work composed for, and performed by, his longtime friends and champions Kronos Quartet—as well as a new disc called Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector: Music of Terry Riley, on June 23, 2015, in North America and July 10 for the rest of the world. Riley and Kronos met more than 35 years ago, and since then, the quartet has commissioned 27 works from him, more than from any other composer in the group’s history.

Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector includes a new recording of the title piece, which was Riley’s first for Kronos, as well as previously unreleased recordings of Lacrymosa – Remembering Kevin and One Earth, One People, One Love from Sun Rings; Cry of a Lady (originally released on A Thousand Thoughts); and G Song and Cadenza on the Night Plain (both originally released on 25 Years). Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector also is available for individual purchase. 

Kronos Quartet continues its celebration of its friend with the KRONOS PRESENTS: Terry Riley Festival, June 26–28 at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco. The festival, the first project in the new KRONOS PRESENTS series, features some of Riley’s most significant and rarely-performed works, plus several world premieres composed in his honor, with special guest performers including Zakir Hussain, Wu Man, Riley’s son Gyan, and Riley himself.

Kronos’ violinist, founder, and artistic director David Harrington says of the Quartet’s remarkably fruitful relationship with Terry Riley, which began in the late 1970s at Mills College in Oakland, California: “There is no other composer who has added so many new musical words to our vocabulary, words from so many corners of the musical world. Terry introduced Kronos to Pandit Pran Nath, Zakir Hussain, Bruce Connor, La Monte Young, Anna Halprin, Hamza El Din, Jon Hassell, and Gil Evans.” He continues, “In a crazed world laced with violence and destruction he has consistently been a force for peace. Through his gentle leadership a path forward has emerged. Terry sets the standard for what it means to be a musician in our time.”

Riley says of his 35 years of working with Kronos: “Each of our projects together was launched by conversations with both David and me riffing on ideas. I always came away from these planning sessions feeling exhilarated, and these energies would soon get my pen moving toward a melody or a rhythmic pattern—or, in the case of Salome Dances for Peace, a five-quartet cycle. David has this gift, a unique catalytic effect on so many collaborators. Because of this gift, we have this astounding body of work created for Kronos over the past four decades.”

Kronos Quartet DEREK CHARKE Tundra Songs

On Tuesday, March 10, Centrediscs, the label of the Canadian Music Centre, releases Tundra Songs, featuring Kronos Quartet in a trio of works by Canadian composer Derek Charke. Guest artist Tanya Tagaq, the charismatic Polaris Prize-winning Inuit throat singer, appears on the 30-minute title track, which David Harrington, Artistic Director of Kronos, describes as “really one of the major, spectacular pieces that has ever been written for Kronos.” The disc also includes Cercle du Nord III which, like Tundra Songs, incorporates environmental sounds from northern Canada; and four of Charke’s series of Inuit Throat Song Games. All of these pieces were commissioned and premiered by the Kronos Quartet to critical acclaim in North America and Europe.

 Born in 1974, Charke is noted for works that address current environmental issues, including climate change and the impact of oil exploration in the tar sands. Tundra Songs and Cercle du Nord III both feature field recordings he made on trips to Canada’s far North.

 For Tundra Songs, Charke traveled with his gear to the Nunavut capital of Iqaluit on Baffin Island, proceeding to a two-day trip out on the ice by dog sled. There he recorded sounds of cracking and grinding ice sheets, shrimp, krill, and other marine life (via hydrophone), the shrieks of ravens, and various sounds of daily life in the region’s communities. Tundra Songs weaves these environmental samples into an often propulsive texture that also incorporates vocal sounds from Tanya Tagaq, who has developed the ability to sing call-and-response Inuit throat song games (also known as Katajak) on her own, and from the quartet itself, which employs circular bowing techniques that evoke throat singing. The work’s five movements move through the region’s cycle of seasons, focusing in turn on ice, water sounds, a folk tale with an unexpected twist, the howls of dogs, and the airborne sounds of ravens and insects. Wrote Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times, “[Charke] has a command of likable post-Minimalist techniques. He creates grooves. He matches string textures, through devices such as circular bowing, with atmospheric sounds…. Tundra Songs is the 600-and-somethingth piece written for Kronos over more than three decades – and another keeper.

 Cercle du Nord III draws on sounds recorded in Canada’s Northwest Territories, including birds, dogs and dog sledding, walking and running in the snow and wind. Says Charke, “As I was trying to capture these sounds I found the sounds of modern life infiltrating the pristine environment. Snowmobiles, trucks driving on the ice roads, and a pervasive hum of the Inuvik power plant.” As in Tundra Songs, the string writing is inspired by the hocket-like technique of the Katajak games played between two singers. As the piece progresses, synthesizer sounds are added into the texture. The ancient and the new collide as they do in the region itself: “As the younger generation returns to their cultural roots they do so with a twist; bringing with them influences of popular culture… World globalization is taking hold and the north is not excluded.” Allan Kozinn of The New York Times called Cercle du Nord III “inventive, richly textured.”

 The Inuit Throat Song Games represent Charke’s earliest use of the circular bowing techniques featured in the other pieces. Notes Charke, “Working with violinist Carter Williams I stumbled on a technique that emulated guttural sounds I had heard in the Katajak. To produce the desired effect players grip the bow with a fist-like grip and bow in circular or vertical movements. The performer also uses an unusual amount of pressure resulting in a sound that is coarse and grinding. To enhance the effect the instruments can be prepared with miniature clothespins. These are placed near the bridge and on the string. Similar to a prepared piano the notes played on these strings have a different, grittier sound.”

Kronos Quartet / Aki Takahashi MORTON FELDMAN Piano and String Quartet

New York native and avant-garde composer Morton Feldman composed this work just two years before his death in 1987, and it haunts the listener into a prism of melancholy. Shifting, unsettling, and yet every bit hypnotic, pianist Aki Takahashi and the world-renowned Kronos Quartet conjure up the ghost of Feldman to wander the streets of New York as if they were abandoned. This single piece, over 79 minutes in length, is like an icy flower that blooms almost undetected. Takahashi is so delicate on the piano as to whisper quiet clusters of notes, reverberated by the Kronos Quartet for further contemplation. Feldman often preferred his performances and recordings to be very quiet, almost inaudible at times. Truly, it would make no sense to play a Feldman piece at volume ten on the stereo -- it would be like shining huge spotlights on a Rothko painting. The beauty is in the shadows, and the chill of "Piano and String Quartet" opens it's vast arms and pulls the listener in alongside the darkness. Breathtaking. (Glenn Swan)

RICHARD REED PARRY Music for Heart and Breath

Arcade Fire multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry will issue his new solo album, Music for Heart and Breath, on June 9th through Deutsche Grammophon. It’s his first piece of solo material since 2009′s From Here On Out and follows collaborations with The National, Islands, The Unicorns, and Belle Orchestre, where he plays alongside Arcade Fire violinist Sarah Neufeld. Parry had previously debuted the work live, but this marks the first time it’s been properly released. While the LP’s title might imply it’s a record about love and relationships, it’s actually quite literal: “very soft, very quiet music, played utterly in sych with the heart rates and breathing rates of the musicians performing it”, Parry explained in a statement. “Every note you hear is either in synch with the heartbeat of the person playing it, the breathing of the person (or one of the surrounding persons) playing it,” Parry added. “So what you hear when this music plays is played precisely in time with someone’s quiet, internal rhythms. Brought to musical life by a handful of different ensembles. And now, at last, recorded in full, and coming out on Deutsche Grammophon in a few weeks from now. It has been a joy to create this work, and even more of a joy to have it brought to life by such a fantastic cast of musical minds.”

(Michelle Geslani)

Kronos Quartet NIGHT PRAYERS

To a Cold War generation reared to believe that only official arts could flourish in the harsh cultural climate of the Soviet Union, the discovery of a vast and fantastically varied world of music came as not just one surprise, but many. Even during the dark Brezhnev years, the part-Tatar, part Russian Sofia Gubaidulina was improvising with a group of unapproved folk musicians and developing a musical language for her even more strenuously unauthorized Russian Orthodox faith. In Georgia, Giya Kancheli was producing music of quiet theatricality, and explosive reverence. In Azerbaijan, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh was charging down two simultaneously un-Soviet paths: Viennese modernism in the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg, and mugham, the classical folk music of her homeland. In the 1990s, after the Soviet empire collapsed, the Kronos Quartet was quick to capitalize on the newly popular rubric of Eastern European mysticism, which included, somewhat awkwardly, composers who had little more in common than a spirit of non-materialistic transcendence. Night Prayers is not so much a collection of religious music as a mood album, a document of a time when composers found refuge from their historical era in an elaborately constructed sense of timelessness. (Justin Davidson)

Kronos Quartet A THOUSAND THOUGHTS

A Thousand Thoughts, whose title comes from the traditional Swedish melody that opens the program, is not a release of new material but a compilation of prior Kronos Quartet performances that draw on international materials. They go back as far as 1989, but the majority come from after 2000, when this aspect of the group's repertoire has become more important. As such, reactions to them may well depend on whether listeners think this kind of experiment represents laudable curiosity or a drive-by approach to world music. Even the detractors, though, would do well to note the following positives. The Kronos Quartet has been highly influential in this regard, as it has in so many others, and it's due to their efforts that it's commonplace nowadays to hear tango music (as heard here) or something similar on a string quartet recital. The group does not simply rely on standards that fit the quartet medium but often feature representatives of the ethnic traditions involved, pushing themselves a bit to enter into exotic sound worlds. (Especially successful in this regard is the concluding version of Danny Boy, sung by the late Texas country singer and yodeler Don Walser, the so-called Pavarotti of the Plains; this version was available on one of Walser's albums but is not exactly a common item.) The sound engineering associated with the Kronos has always been high-class, and this collection of live and studio tracks recorded over almost a 25-year period holds together as a unit quite well. Likewise, the quartet itself has maintained a consistent sound over the several changes in personnel represented here. This has the potential to serve as a good sampler for those interested in the ethnomusicological side of contemporary chamber music. (James Manheim)

Kronos Quartet NUEVO

On Nuevo, a collection of music from Mexico spanning nearly 100 years, Kronos Quartet presents a kaleidoscopic view of a music as diverse as the culture of the country itself. On each track, the group’s sound is transformed, through the collaborative efforts of co-producers Gustavo Santaolalla, the noted Argentinean musician and Rock en Español producer, longtime Kronos producer Judith Sherman, and Kronos Artistic Director David Harrington, as well as through arrangements by composers Osvaldo Golijov, Stephen Prutsman, and Ricardo Gallardo, whose efforts serve to reflect the individual spirit and character of each song.

Harrington notes that walking through Mexico City inspired the record. “I became fascinated with this sense of the layering of things there—of time, of music, of culture, of art … And how you’d walk down the street and never know what you’re going to hear next.”

The sonic landscape of Nuevo suggests the vastness of Mexican culture, a diverse array of experiences and ideas—intellectual, spiritual, and cultural. From the boom-boxes on the street corners to the incessant blaring of television sets, from the traditions of Son huasteco and corrido singing to the influence of Cuba on the culture and music, the sounds of Mexico are the sounds of a place where elements of popular culture and traditional music share a lively coexistence.

The tracks from Nuevo are culled from seemingly disparate sources ranging from "Mini Skirt," by the late Juan Garcia Esquivel, whose early experimentation with stereo caused him to be dubbed the "King of Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music"; to Chavosuite, which features music from three wildly popular Mexican television programs, the original Chespirito and two spin-offs, El Chapulín Colorado and El Chavo del Ocho; to an explosive Prutsman arrangement of Silvestre Revueltas’s "Sensemaya"; to Golijov’s "K´in Sventa Ch´ul Me´tik Kwadulupe" (Festival for the Holy Mother Guadalupe), a composition based on David Lewiston’s 1970’s recording from the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Nuevo also highlights a variety of unusual instruments, like the musical leaf as played by Carlos Garcia on Alberto Domínguez’s "Perfidia" and the organillo performance featured on Belisario García de Jesús and José Elizondo’s "Cuatro Milpas."

The album also features rock en Español supergroup Café Tacuba’s "12/12," a five-part sonic portrait of contemporary Mexico, named for the celebration of the Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe observed throughout Mexico on December 12. The piece is an aural tapestry weaving together not only the sounds of electric and acoustic instruments, but also traditional Mexican music and street sounds. It fittingly reflects the spirit of Nuevo, in its merging of widely different sounds and textures to create a unified whole.

Closing the album is a remix of Severiano Briseño’s "Sinaloense" by the DJ Plankton Man, formerly of Tijuana’s Nortec Collective.

Kronos Quartet BRYCE DESSNER Aheym

 Bryce Dessner is a guitarist with the alternative-rock and Americana band the National, and this album with the Kronos Quartet appears not on its longtime label home of Nonesuch but on the rock-oriented Anti imprint. The sound, from the standpoint of classical music, is a bit overheated, but Dessner certainly fits with the quartet's long-term goals of commissioning music from younger composers and generally reaching out to music lovers of whatever genre. The four pieces here were written for a concert in Brooklyn, New York's Prospect Park. Each one has a fairly specific program; the title work, Aheym, denotes the concept "homeward" in Yiddish and is dedicated to the memory of Dessner's own Polish Jewish ancestors. It is questionable as to whether the listener would intuit the programs without knowing them in advance, for the music is written in what might be called a turbo-minimalist style that remains consistent, building as each work proceeds. The third piece, Tenebre, features triple-layered vocals at the end from new-folk singer Sufjan Stevens, as well as an octuple-layered Kronos Quartet, but certainly the most interesting piece is the last one, Tour Eiffel. Here Dessner modifies his minimalist language and forges a three-unit texture consisting of a children's choir, a small band led by his own guitar, and the quartet. These three play off each other in simple but original ways, each refracting a text by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro about the Eiffel Tower. It's a novel conception, and it makes one want to hear more from its composer. Recommended for those interested in classical-rock fusions. (James Manheim)