New York, NY (Top40 Charts) This
Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend, Kronos Quartet, continuing its 40th anniversary celebration through the 2013-14 concert season, performs two nights at the Power Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, tonight and on Saturday, as part of the University of Michigan's Renegade Series. Tonight's performance places an emphasis on historical renegades; on the program are works by Laurie Anderson, Krzysztof Penderecki , Wiley, Monk, and Wagner, along with Steve Reich 's WTC 9/11 - recorded for Nonesuch Records in 2011 - and John Oswald's Spectre, both written for Kronos. The second half of the concert consists of
George Crumb's
Black Angels , the piece that inspired Kronos founder
David Harrington to form the group.
Saturday's program takes a look at contemporary political events through the renegade lens, opening with the premiere of Suite from 'Dirty Wars,' with music from the film Dirty Wars , which features music performed by Kronos Quartet was just nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. This multipart suite features works by
David Harrington, who was music supervisor on the film, the Palestinian collective Ramallah Underground, a contemporary Iraqi folk song, and a traditional Lebanese song recorded on Kronos's 2009 Nonesuch album, Floodplain.
The Quartet goes on to perform another piece from Floodplain , Aleksandra Vrebalov's …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… , Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," and two pieces by composers affiliated with the University of Michigan: professor Michael Daugherty's Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover and the world premiere of alum
David T. Little's AGENCY .
Detroit Free Press, previewing this weekend's concerts, writes that so many of Kronos's "achievements have been absorbed into the DNA of classical music, that it's easy to overlook how revolutionary the group was … [Kronos] was there first, opening doors with a damn-the-rules mentality that inspired multiple generations of new music ensembles."
