Kronos Quartet performed at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, over the weekend in a concert that led San Jose Mercury News music critic Richard Scheinin to exclaim: "With its charisma and chops, its taste and unflagging sense of mission, Kronos just keeps getting better. After 30-plus years, Kronos is tops, as it showed Sunday night."

Scheinin describes their performance as "flesh-and-blood music ... earthy yet rarefied—like the blues, like Buddy Guy's guitar." The program closed with Aleksandra Vrebalov's ... hold me, neighbor, in this storm ..., off the group's latest Nonesuch release, Floodplain, and which Scheinin says Kronos played "with blood-red zeal."

Opening the show was a performance from eighth blackbird, whom Scheinin calls "a brilliant ensemble." The group performs Steve Reich's Double Sextet on the forthcoming first recording of the piece from Nonesuch, now available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store.

Read the complete concert review at mercurynews.com.

This week's concerts at the Cabrillo Festival feature works by composers-in-residence John Adams, whose City Noir will be performed on Saturday, and Philip Glass, whose Cello Concerto closes the festival on Sunday. For more on the festival, head to cabrillomusic.org.

Kronos Quartet next performs a free outdoor concert at Damrosch Park Bandshell in New York City Friday evening as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series. Also on the bill for the event are special guests Gamelan Galak Tika, led by Evan Ziporyn of Bang on a Can (which performs Reich's 2x5 on the aforementioned Double Sextet album), and, making its New York debut, Kenge Kenge. For more Kronos Quartet tour information, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.