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Review: Kronos Quartet

At Stanford, Kronos unveiled 'A Chinese Home,' and collaborator Wu Man played a mean pipa.

by Eric Johnson on Jan 20, 2010
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Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home, which had its West Coast premiere at Stanford’s Memorial Theater Saturday night, is the most recent collaboration between the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, master of the Chinese pipa. It was a success—but I’m glad Kronos and Wu decided to open the night with their first piece, 1995’s Ghost Opera.

Yin Yu Tang, conceived by Wu and Kronos’ first violinist David Harrington, is a fascinating multi-media trip through recent Chinese history. Its effect was powerful, but its pleasures mostly intellectual. Ghost Opera, written by avante-guardist-turned-film-composer Tan Dun (whose score for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won him an Oscar), is an experimental piece, a quasi-ritual, apparently designed to blow minds. It’s probably just a matter of taste, but I tend to go in more for the mind-blowing than the edifying.

Part of what made the night so enjoyable overall was the novelty of hearing Wu show what she can do with the pipa, a guitar-sized four-stringed zither that is played using a fancy technique of plucking and hammering. Ghost Opera seemed custom made to display Wu’s mastery. The piece is punctuated by silences, into which Wu would drop a single quavering note. At other times she played so fast it seemed impossible—employing the techniques known in Western classical music as tremolando and bisbigliando ("whispering”).

The piece also called on Kronos to flex its famously diverse skills—including the ensemble’s knack for theatrics. The piece opened with the band members walking (or dancing) in, one at a time, playing a folky tune which ultimately was developed as the piece’s thematic center. Before settling into their usual roles with their usual instruments, they took turns playing Chinese rattles and cymbals, as well as orchestrated vocalizations: musical exhalations and exclamations(!). When, eventually they all settled in and fired up the violins, viola and cello, the familiar noise they produced was a pleasant shock.

Ghost Opera was staged gorgeously, with a translucent silk scrim hanging from the ceiling 40-plus feet above the stage, and another, made of paper, swooping diagonally from the ceiling at stage right to the floor at stage left. Throughout, the piece is a conversation between the quartet and Wu; at times a straight-up call-and-response. For much of the piece Wu was seated behind the band, on an elevated platform behind the translucent scrim—a poetic effect,

Ghost Opera is stunningly inventive, and so much of its charm lies in the surprising ways these inventions work, I don’t want to spoil it by describing the piece. I will reveal that it closes with the musicians each standing before bottom-lit glass bowls of water, bowing cymbals that have been dipped in the water, producing a haunting melody. They then set the cymbals aside and simply run the water through their hands, producing (of course) the sound of a creek or waterfall. For me, the players had fully become the monks they were portraying in the opera—the ritual worked. I was transported.

Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home began on a similar note. As it opens, a dense racket of thick harmonies and dissonances can be heard emanating from offstage. I will admit that I thought I was hearing some kind of synthesized cacophony blasting through the speakers; it was in fact the quartet and Wu, accoustic, playing lusheng, which are sort of a Chinese version of Uilleann pipes.

Where the opening was purposely reminiscent of a ritual, the rest of the epic-sized piece was a high-tech docu-opera, if there can be such a thing. A screen behind the performers displayed montages clipped from propaganda films, home movies, war newsreel footage and old Chinese blockbusters. The music was similarly clipped from various sources—a mashup of folk tunes from various provinces, movie soundtracks, and pop hits, some of it recorded, most played live.

Wu Man sang several songs throughout the evening—including ancient chants from the mountains and Westernized jazz tunes form the 1940s: her voice was a pleasant surprise. All in all, sharing the stage with one of the world’s leading ensembles, she stole the show.



by Eric Johnson on Jan 20, 2010
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