Kronos Quartet was in Glasgow, Scotland, this past weekend for Kronos in Glasgow, a mini-festival in which Kronos was joined by special guest collaborators, hand-picked by the Quartet, for an international program of events taking place all weekend across Glasgow's Concert Halls. The Herald Scotland gives a perfect five stars to Friday's main Kronos concert in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, which featured "Reich's remarkable multi-layered response to 9/11." STV calls the concert "a triumph ... nothing less than entrancing and massively entertaining from start to finish."
Kronos Quartet continued a month of major events—which included their winning the Avery Fisher Prize and the Polar Music Prize, and the European premiere of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11 at the Barbican—with Kronos in Glasgow, a mini-festival this past weekend in which Kronos was joined by special guest collaborators, hand-picked by the Quartet, for an international program of events taking place all weekend across Glasgow's Concert Halls.
The Herald Scotland gives Friday night's central Kronos concert in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall's Main Auditorium a perfect five stars. The concert included the Scottish premiere of WTC 9/11, which the Herald's Keith Bruce calls a "remarkable multi-layered response to 9/11," along with works by Terry Riley, Michael Gordon, Sigur Rós, and Jon Rose, and a performance by the National Youth Choir of Scotland. Read the concert review at heraldscotland.com.
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STV calls the concert "a triumph produced thanks to the Kronos Quartet’s boldness at striding across boundaries and circumnavigating the very idea of genres, the group delivering a performance that nothing less than entrancing and massively entertaining from start to finish."
STV's Michael MacLennan says Kronos's performance of Sigur Rós's Flugufrelsarinn was "simply stunning" and Reich's WTC 9/11 as "spell-binding."
In the end, MacLennan concludes, it would have been "surely impossible not to have left feeling you’d witnessed something very, very special indeed."
Read the review at stv.tv.
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On Saturday night, Kronos led a triple bill of musics from across the globe at the Old Fruitmarket, featuring Finland's Ritva Koistinen, one of the leading players of the kantele, a zither-like string instrument; Azerbaijan's Alim Qasimov Ensemble, which is featured on Kronos Quartet's latest Nonesuch album, Floodplain; and Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, with whom Kronos performed Derek Charke's Tundra Songs.
"An energy built up tangibly during the course of their fascinating set," MacLennan writes of the Qasimov set, "lending a propulsion that made the final brace of numbers a complete joy, Qasimov and his daughter’s superb vocals ringing out tumultuously over the racing rhythms and Eastern sounds."
All in all, the concert left the audience "exhilaratingly flung around several far corners of the globe."
Read the review of Saturday's show at stv.tv.
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Reviewing Sunday's closing concert, MacLennan says this one weekend saw Kronos "tackle more genres than you could have hoped to take in during a whole year of shows, never mind over three measly days. The good news is that they’ll be back at the Concert Hall next May to perform Dracula alongside composer Phillip Glass; until then they’ll be much missed in Glasgow after a superb series of shows." Read that review also at stv.tv.
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Kronos Quartet heads next to Norwich, England, to perform at the Theatre Royal Tuesday night as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival. On the program is WTC 9/11, as well as works by Gordon, Laurie Anderson, Damon Albarn, Bryce Dessner, Clint Mansell, and Aleksandra Vrebalov. For more on upcoming performances, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour. To peruse Kronos's Nonesuch catalog, head to the Nonesuch Store now.
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