Music That Blends the New and Unusual

The Kronos Quartet performs with Mariana Sadovska. Evan Neff

By DAVID MERMELSTEIN 2/8/16, 7:24 PM

The Kronos Quartet is so often on the road that even its fans forget the group is based here. So it occurred to its members—David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; and Sunny Yang, cello—that an annual festival dedicated to the unusual repertory Kronos inspires and champions might strengthen the ties between this forward-looking ensemble and its home. And so the group presented a series of concerts from Feb. 4 through 7 largely devoted to emerging composers at SFJazz Center, one of this city’s most appealing new venues. Like Kronos’s tribute to the composer Terry Riley last year, also at SFJazz, these programs, under the banner “Explorer Series,” typically featured a bevy of guest artists and unusual instruments, to say nothing of the atmospheric “backing tracks” intrinsic to the scores the group favors. Premieres of various stripes (U.S., West Coast, San Francisco) dominated, but only the concerts on Thursday and Friday included international debuts. More important, two-thirds of the works on Feb. 4 were composed by women; half on Feb. 5. Thursday’s concert opened with the premiere of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s “Reqs (Dance),” in which the rhythms of the Azerbaijani composer’s homeland sounded like music that might accompany a German Expressionist film or be played by a Gypsy band. Another premiere, Reena Esmail’s hypnotic arrangement of N. Rajam’s “Dadra in Raga Bhairavi,” successfully mimicked Hindustani music by having Ms. Yang (Kronos’s newest member and sole female) slap the body of her cello to imitate a tabla. Mariana Sadovska’s 20-minute “Chernobyl.The Harvest” couldn’t be anything but mournful. But it suffered by immediately following an arrangement of Severiano Briseño’s “Man From Sinaloa,” with 27 instrumentalists from a local arts high school augmenting Kronos to form what sounded like a huge mariachi band.