Word: jeanrenaud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Guess again. The blond (Joan Jeanrenaud) is a cellist by craft, and the longhair (Hank Dutt) plays, appropriately, the viola. Along with violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, they form the Kronos Quartet, the nation's most adventurous chamber-music ensemble. No Haydn or Mozart for this earnest foursome. Works by Charles Ives and Anton Webern are probably the creakiest items in their wide, of-today repertoire. It ranges from Steve Reich's Different Trains, in which synthesized voices, recorded railroad sounds and minimalist arpeggios are combined in a haunting memoir, to a growling, down- and-dirty setting of Jimi...
...color-coordinated outfits, and their concerts are often akin to performance art. Beyond that, the Kronos is a resolute, almost fanatic champion of new music. It has given world premieres of more than 200 works, including five so far this year. "When people come to a Kronos concert," says Jeanrenaud, "they know they will hear something that requires a reaction, even if they don't like what they are hearing. You can't just sit back and relax...
...KRONOS QUARTET (Nonesuch). The San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet (Violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, Violist Hank Dutt and Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud) looks like a new-wave band and plays like an iconoclast's image-busting dream come to fiddling life. This disk offers the Balinese- influenced String Quartet No. 8 by the idiosyncratic Australian Peter Sculthorpe, the introspective Quartet No. 3 by conservative Finnish Composer Aulis Sallinen, Philip Glass's somber, eight-minute Company, the rarely heard 1942 String Quartet by expatriate American Conlon Nancarrow and, as an encore, an arrangement of Rock Guitarist Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze...
| 1 |