Looking through someone’s record collection can be a great way to get a sense of their musical influences. But a guided tour provides deeper insights still. And while David Harrington’s Listening Party is surprisingly light on tunes, it provides enough context to function as a mini autobiography of the rule-breaking violinist and founder of Kronos Quartet.
This giant of contemporary classical music begins the hour-long talk by going back six decades to the moment he first heard Beethoven’s late string quartets. Playing a single chord several times over, he identifies it as a moment of pure perfection that he’s been striving to achieve ever since
Harrington’s next “Hallelujah” moment came not from Handel but from George Crumb, whose terrifying shrieking violins prompted him to found the Kronos Quartet (though it took sixteen years for them to record Black Angels). Later he tells the audience that Steve Reich’s Different Trains had a shorter gestation, but required nine days in the studio and “turned Kronos into a quintet” with a sound engineer as the fifth member.
Harrington’s relaxed delivery befits his status as elder statesman, and he regularly veers off on tangents as he cherry-picks stories from his time at the forefront of contemporary classical music.
Throughout the hour, he also bounces ideas off Irish viola player Garth Knox, an old friend who joins him onstage. The prodigiously talented Knox is more concise in his delivery, choosing to follow up a story about the truculent Conlon Nancarrow’s “lost” compositions with a performance on the viola d’amore.
This largely forgotten instrument has seven sympathetic strings below the main ones to provide
harmonics, and after showing off the instrument’s traditional range he employs a variety of unusual bowing and plucking techniques to significantly expand the sounds that it can create. Like the entire performance, it’s a display that gives great insight into his creative process and shows off the breadth of his knowledge without ever speaking down to the audience.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The reviewer attended the performance on the 5th of March.
