KRONOS QUARTET:
'IN ACCORD' -
DVD [KAT.-NR 100 050]
see DVD overview
Amazon
UK £18.99
This is among the first of what will probably be a very large number of DVD's
which are essentially repackaged television documentaries - which means that
one gets all the benefits of the system as a carrier (superb sound and picture
quality, plus the ability to access individual tracks) but none of the
interactive possibilities which programme makers will be exploring in the
years ahead.
That having been said, it's a real treat to see this fifty-minute German
television documentary, produced by RM Associates for ZDF Television, and
directed by Manfred Waffender in 1998, shortly before cellist Joan Jeanrenaud
left the group, and to hear them speak about their repertoire. What we have
here is essentially a Greatest Hits compilation, almost all of which has
been released in audio form, drawing on material from six or seven separate
CD's and illustrating the remarkable range of the Quartet's skills and
preoccupations.
The formula is a simple one: two recording sessions, both captured on four
cameras, one in a studio, the other on a concert platform, intercut with
brief interview statements in each of which one member of the ensemble makes
a few prefatory comments about the music to be heard. In televisual terms
this works well, and the director is to be applauded for his decision to
let the music speak for itself, with generously long sections from the pieces
in question, played in audio terms in an unedited form, though with a variety
of visual material, much of which (bearing in mind that this seems not to
have been an extravagantly funded production) provides an appropriate counterpart
to the music.
The programme begins with rather 'hip' visuals, in which gritty urban images
are overlaid (in black and white) over still photographs of the quartet,
in a manner reminiscent of the 1960's 'underground' films of Robert Frank,
Jonas Mekas and San Francisco's Bruce Baillie. This is edited to a skilful
sound montage, which brings together sections of a number of the pieces to
be heard later on the disc. This arresting beginning is followed by an
essentially simple formula: a chunk of excerpted interview followed by a
piece of music, generally with some kind of visual cutaway. And the range
of the music - to say nothing of the brio with which it's performed - is
just what one would expect from the Kronos. Beginning with Piazolla's 'Four
for Tango' [1987, from the CD 'Winter Was Hard'], the programme moves through
'Where Was Wisdom When We Went West?', a section from Terry Riley's exquisite
'Cadenzas on The Night Plain' [1984, a CD in its own right], to Hamza El
Din's 'Escalay' ('Water Wheel'), [1989] from the remarkable album 'Pieces
of Africa'.
Of 'Escalay' the Sudanese composer, who is a master of the oud, recounts
how his village lost its source of water when the Aswan Dam was built, reducing
it to near desert. The 'Water Wheel' sequence is an evocation of his childhood
memories of an oxen-drawn wheel used to pump water from a well on to the
fields. A plangent and haunting piece, it is nicely complemented on the DVD
by images (as throughout, in black and white) of just such a wheel, drawn
by oxen, and of peasant life in the Sudan.
This is followed - as though evidence were needed to demonstrate the Quartet's
catholicity - by John Zorn's 'Cat O'Nine Tails: Tex Avery Directs the Marquis
de Sade', [1988, from the CD 'Short Stories']. This is a piece of post-modern
collage, which jumps, cartoon-like, from atonal screeches, through what
Jeanrenaud calls 'scratching', to long glissandi and fragments of old-time
dance music, which always make me think of the Californian Gold Rush. The
effect, evident even in the short extract on the DVD, is akin to that of
William Boroughs's early 'cut-ups', and is thoroughly enjoyable. I await
an all-Zorn CD from the Kronos. The disk goes on to include work by John
Adams ['John's Book of Alleged Dances, 1994], Harry Partch [Two Studies on
Ancient Greek Scales, 1946] and Alfred Schnittke ['Where Every Verse Is Filled
With Grief', 1997].
There are two pieces of early music here, both featured on the Quartet's
CD 'Early Music': Hildegard von Bingen's austerely beautiful 'O Virtus Sapientie'
and Perotin's 'Viderunt Omnes'. The latter, a piece of early mediaeval plainsong,
is probably best known from David Munrow's 'Music of the Gothic Era', where
it is performed as a Gregorian chant accompanied by bells; here the drone
element is provided by the insistent presence of Jeanrenaud's cello. As the
group's viola player, Hank Dutt, points out, the ensemble has developed a
very distinctive sound, with often quite sparing use of vibrato, but with
an alertness - though I supposed every chamber ensemble would claim this
- to intonation and phrasing.
The two early music tracks and the Schnittke piece use black and white footage
- some seemingly from archive sources, the rest, one presumes, specially
shot, but hand-held and rough-edged, giving it a primitive look and an
appropriately grainy quality - featuring a ruined church, diverse religious
icons and a graveyard. In the case of the Schnittke composition, the imagery
shifts from the iconography of the Orthodox Church to the inscriptions on
the headstones of a Jewish cemetery, suggesting that the threnody is a lament
for the dead of all faiths.
Death is the focus of 'Altar de Muertos', 1997, by the Mexican composer Gabriela
Ortiz. Both she and Terry Riley wrote requiems for the Quartet following
the premature death of the teenage son of its leader David Harrington.
Harrington, who speaks - as, indeed, they all do - very eloquently in the
programme, refers to the Mexican Day of the Dead as a 'helpful ceremony'
and one to which he relates on a personal level. This piece, which is musically
interesting, involving the striking of gourds floating in water and the
musicians' wearing bells attached to their ankles, is dealt with - to my
taste - more theatricality than is strictly necessary, with three of the
musicians wearing skull masks and a generally stagey presentation. This,
clearly, was the group's decision, rather than the programme-maker's - witness
the specially designed backdrop and lighting.
Where director Manfred Waffender tries to enhance the visual impact of the
performances - by his use of the black and white footage, for example - he
generally does so stylishly and with restraint, though I personally hated
his use in a couple of sequences of garish blue and pink lighting and of
shooting the musicians deliberately out of focus - MTV-ish techniques which
drew attention to themselves without adding very much. Production values
were at their best, I felt, in the final sequence, the Quartet's much celebrated
encore piece, Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze', arranged by Steve Rifkin [1967,
from the CD 'Kronos Quartet']: here the editing was crisp and sharp, skilfully
intercutting footage from the two filming sessions, and conveying very well
the remarkable stage presence of the group.
Taken as a whole, the DVD offers a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the
Quartet's work, and one which well illustrates the breadth of its repertoire.
The fact that it is essentially a television programme rather than a disc
which exploits the medium's interactivity is not particularly relevant: it
was made in 1998, and was in all probability shot in a couple of days and
on a fairly small budget; we should be grateful that it's been made available.
If it hasn't yet been shown on British television it would be good if it
were, perhaps to coincide with the group's next British tour. Whatever purists
might say of the group's skills when it comes to the classical repertoire
- and I'm sure that there are more highly regarded renderings of Bartok and
other canonical composers - they have done an enormous amount to alert audiences
to the range, variety and sheer pleasure to be found in contemporary and
near-contemporary work, and have done so, in my view, without serious compromise.
COLIN STILL
