Kronos Quartet Takes Up Residence at U-Md.

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LIKE ALL GREAT artistic endeavors, Kronos Quartet was seeded by dissatisfaction. It was 1973; the Vietnam War was grinding on.

"Late one night, I heard George Crumb's 'Black Angels' on the radio," recalled violinist David Harrington, pictured at left. "And as a 23-year-old, until that moment of hearing 'Black Angels,' I was searching for the right music to play. Nothing felt right to me. I just couldn't find it. And then all of a sudden, seemingly by accident, there it was."

The quartet had its first rehearsal the next month. Nearly 35 years later, Kronos has a reputation as the contemporary string quartet, having commissioned hundreds of works from cutting-edge composers and put new spins on once-unlikely concert-hall choices as Jimi Hendrix and Ornette Coleman.

This weekend, Kronos begins an extended residency at the University of Maryland. On Thursday, the group's founder demonstrates that his iPod simply isn't like yours, in a program called "What's David Harrington Listening To?"

And Friday, Kronos continues its tour of "Awakening," a concert in remembrance of Sept. 11. For the first time since recording Aulis Sallinen's "Winter Was Hard" the group is performing it live, with the assistance of local school choruses. The evening's centerpiece is Michael Gordon's "The Sad Park," a harrowing composition inspired by Manhattan children's recollections of the day the towers fell.

As radical as Kronos' departures from the traditional quartet instrumentation and repertoire can be "the employment of power tools and junk percussion for Einsturzende Neubauten’s "Armenia," for example — the group's thirst for the new extends back to a pre-teen encounter with one of the three "B's."

"My first string-quartet record was when I became a member of the Columbia Record Club. And I got a copy of the Budapest Quartet playing Beethoven's Opus 127. And I fell in love with those E-flat-major chords," Harrington recalled. He formed his first quartet about a week later.

"And I feel like I'm doing the same thing today that I was doing when I was 12, really," he laughed. "If I hear something that I really can't live without, then it's gotta become part of our music."

» Clarice Smith Center, University Boulevard & Stadium Drive, College Park; Thu., 7 p.m., free (listening party), & Fri., 8 p.m., $40 (concert); 301-405-2787. (College Park-UMd.)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo by Zoran Orlic