Kronos Quartet

"SCULTHORPE / SALLINEN / GLASS / NANCARROW / HENDRIX"

1985

Credits

• Kronos Quartet:
• David Harrington: violin.
• John Sherba: violin.
• Hank Dutt: viola.
• Joan Jeanrenaud: cello.
• Produced by Thomas Frost.
• Recorded June 1985 at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
• Letters, NYC.
• Engineer: John Newton.
• Digital Editing: E. Amelia Rogers.
• Mastering: Robert C. Ludwig.
• Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz.

References

• Elektra Nonesuch 979111-2

Tracks

• 1-5. Peter Sculthorpe "String Quartet No. 8" (13:41)
• 6. Aulis Sallinen "String Quartet No. 3" (14:05)
• 7-10. Philip Glass "Company" (7:53)
• 11-13. Conlon Nancarrow "String Quartet" (11:07)
• 14. Jimi Hendrix "Purple Haze" (3:00)

Notes

'Company' seems not so much modern as neo-romantic; its drenching melancholy makes it a prime example of his current, often overtly emotional style. But his compositional method is still extraordinarily pure. The piece consists the start. We hear very little --and in the first and last movements none at all -- of the rhetoric we'd expect in less minimal music: introductions, say, or transitions, or the stretches of comparative relaxation that in a rigorous older form like a fugue would be called "episodes". The four movements of this piece began as incidental music for a 1983 production of Samuel Beckett's play 'Company' (hence the title of the piece) by the New York experimental theater group Mabou Mines. As a unified composition they fit together remarkably well, and almost in traditional ways: the third movement, for instance, functions just as a slow movement might in Mahler or Beethoven, and the fourth is hard not to hear as a finale.

Pictures

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