A THOUSAND THOUGHTS
Kronos Quartet, Jan. 30
The Kronos Quartet’s extraordinary 46-year legacy was celebrated in A Thousand Thoughts: A Live Documentary Experience by Kronos Quartet, Sam Green, and Joe Bini, presented by Performance Santa Fe for a sold-out house at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.
The 90-minute event was a singular hybrid of documentary film, on-site narration by filmmaker Sam Green, and live performance by the quartet. The fact that it was only partially successful as an artistic whole had to do with the filmmaking and narrative aspects, not the musical ones.
Green and Bini’s stated aim was to put the music at the center of the documentary, rather than commentary, but there’s much more talk than music, given the narrative text plus the on-screen composer interviews. What seems especially ironic is that many of the 20 musical selections that Kronos played are used as underscoring while the talking heads talk, pushing the music into the background. Some of the others are frustratingly brief. All in all, this was the biggest disappointment of the evening.
There were some musical highlights, to be sure. The most memorable excerpt was from George Crumb’s Black Angels, the 1971 anti-Vietnam War piece that inspired Kronos founder David Harrington to assemble a string quartet in order to perform it. This sequence was long enough to have significant impact, and it was staged with real theatricality. As three of the players unveiled a set of eerily illuminated crystal glasses, then played them with their bows to produce ethereal, haunting sounds.
Other effective moments came when live performance was synchronized with the playing of on-screen soloists, in particular the collaboration with pipa player and composer Wu Han in the “Silk and Bamboo” movement from her Four Chinese
Paintings, and in the juxtaposition of a speech by the progressive historian Howard Zinn with music from the Kronos’ soundtrack for the 2000 film Requiem for a Dream.
The quartet’s scrupulously maintained archive provided evocative and often amusing period visuals, supplemented by documentary film and television footage. Thankfully, it included the group’s memorable appearance with Big Bird on Sesame Street in 1987. The many tributes from composers were a mixed bag; some, such as Philip Glass, offered real insights, while others ran too long (especially the multiple iterations of Terry Riley trooping through a pine grove) or felt like a gratuitiously inserted cameo (Laurie Anderson).
The event’s overarching theme, the transience of live performance, came from the filmmakers’ fascination with “The Lost Chord,” a bit of treacly Victoriana by Sir Arthur Sullivan. Green’s perorations on the subject would have been timelier about a century ago.
Another of the filmmakers’ stated goals was to not make a standard tribute film, and they believed that their focus on “bigger ideas” would achieve it. In fact,
A Thousand Thoughts is very much a tribute film and that’s just fine. There’s no American classical music group more deserving of one. They’ve commissioned more than 1,000 new works, with a particular focus on female composers and those from non-Western cultures, introduced new approaches to chamber music performance, and built an international audience that voraciously devours new and challenging music.
Issues of social justice and community well-being have driven the quartet from the very beginning. Their current repertory includes a program called Music for Change: The Banned Countries. It’s a direct response to President Donald Trump’s 2017 executive order, number 13780, which placed limits on travel to the United States from seven countries, five of which are predominately Muslim. The program highlights the artistic heritage of Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia.
Kronos has a unique business model, operating as a nonprofit organization, and the quartet members are full-time employees. This provides them with time for an admirable function that doesn’t get much notice: coaching and mentoring young string players, such as the group of students from the University of New Mexico’s music program they worked with on the morning of the concert. Kudos to them for this, and for so much more over the course of their 46 years. — Mark Tiarks | For