A NEW piece of music composed by Blur’s Damon Albarn will receive its fist live performance by The Kronos Quartet in the Radisson SAS Hotel on Tuesday.
The show, which is part of the Galway Arts Festival, opens at 7pm and the quartet will also perform music by Michael Gordon, Glenn Branca, Bruce Dessner, and Clint Mansell’s Requiem For A Dream, the piece of music they are most famous for, and which was on the soundtrack to the 2000 film.
The award winning quartet - David Harrington (violin ), John Sherba (violin ), Hank Dutt (viola ), and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello ) - have pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet.
In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential groups of our time, collaborating with David Bowie, Terry Riley, Tom Waits, Philip Glass, and Allen Ginsberg. Among their awards are a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004 ) and Musicians of the Year (2003 ) from Musical America.
In 1973, David Harrington was inspired to form Kronos after hearing George Crumb’s ‘Black Angels’, a highly unorthodox, Vietnam War-inspired, work featuring bowed water glasses, spoken word passages, and electronic effects.
Kronos then began building a diverse repertoire for string quartet, performing and recording works by Bartók, Shostakovich, and Webern, contemporary composers like John Adams, jazz legends Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk, and rock musicians like Jimi Hendrix.
Integral to Kronos' work is a series of long-running, in-depth collaborations with the “Father of Minimalism” Terry Riley. One such collaboration was 2002’s Sun Rings, a multimedia, NASA-commissioned ode to the earth and its people, featuring celestial sounds and images from space, while The Cusp Of Magic, commissioned in honour of Riley’s 70th birthday celebrations in 2005, was recorded and released in 2008.
Kronos have also played live with Allen Ginsberg, Tom Waits, and David Bowie, and recorded with DJ Spooky, Dave Matthews, Nelly Furtado, Joan Armatrading and Nine Inch Nails.
For tickets contact the Galway Arts Festival Box Office, Merchants Road, 091 - 566577. See also www.galwayartsfestival.com
