With lights blazing and words boiling, Kronos Quartet comes back to town under Ensemble Music auspices

When I interviewed David Harrington before the Kronos Quartet's first Indianapolis appearance in 1989, he laid out the multimedia vision of the ensemble he had founded 16 years before: "Over the years we've added different kinds of theatrical elements — from light shows to singing robots," he told me for the Indianapolis Star. "That will definitely continue."

And so it has, with most of the expanse of a typically varied concert Wednesday night taken up by works with strong visual appeal, with a screen lowered into place and prerecorded spoken narrative. The host Ensemble Music Society changed venues with Butler University accommodating the move to the technically up-to-date Schrott Center for the Arts.

Kronos has adhered to different styles of musical presentation for 50 years, always anchored in a quest for

Kronos: Hank Dutt, John Sherba, David Harrington, Paul Wiancko

new ways of connecting to its audiences. "We're looking for an evening of music that we feel gives our audience a sense of life," the first violinist told me in 1989 of the group, now comprising cellist Paul Wiancko in addition to original members Hank Dutt, viola, and John Sherba, second violin.

With the stage invitingly lit and all the technology required in place, the Quartet featured two substantial pieces in which the visual and narrative presentation was so rich as to almost overwhelm the music. It may be a peculiar liability, but worth admitting, that when there is a movie to watch, the accompanying music has difficulty registering with me. Even though my taste gravitates to music more than film, what I'm seeing is always more seductive than what I'm hearing. I would be an inept critic of film music.

Thus, with Nicole Lizee's "ZonelyHearts" and Mary Kouyoumdjian's "Silent Cranes," the comic, fantastic exuberance of the first one and the stark documentary heartbreak of the second dominated my impressions. The music followed contrasting styles, with Kronos' virtuosity as performers onscreen and onstage alike especially foregrounded in the Lizee piece. 

The composer is a kind of magpie of popular culture in its advanced forms of shifting and overlapping imagery and narrative discontinuity. "The Twilight Zone," the Rod Serling TV show of sainted memory, is explicitly drawn upon to launch a disjointed story in which reality never rests on solid ground and perceptions in any given moment cannot be trusted. She clearly intends that what the audience processes will shift music itself to a subordinate place. Kronos itself is always at the center, however.

The surrealistic style also seems to draw upon the disorienting fiction of Donald Barthelme and the oblique paranoia and satirical thrust of Nathanael West (with Lizee's title inevitably evoking his novel "Miss Lonelyhearts"). The unreliable narrator has rarely been made the stuff of such spectacle in musical guise. The string quartet is swept into the unreliability: Their bows at one hilarious point go missing and the players work with paper-tube substitutes, getting a ghostly pallor of sound from their instruments.

"Silent Cranes" is a more orderly piece insofar as it steadily evokes the horrific disorder of the Armenian genocide of 1915, committed by Turks upon a minority community of great cultural antiquity and independence.  To this day, Turkish wrath can be visited on anyone who dares to seek official acknowledgment of this crime. 

With the projection design of Laurie Olinder, a parade of beautiful tapestries interspersed with group portraits of Armenians from the early 20th century gives way to blood-splotched images of maps and disturbing photos of slaughtered bodies and a field of skeletons. A series of recorded texts serving as epitaphs accompanies the work's last few minutes. I wish the music had impressed itself upon me as much as what I saw on the screen and heard from survivor testimonies.

One of the pieces of middle length also had a strong visual component: an anthology of black-and-white film clips, tracing from the viewpoint of determined black faces and marching feet the rise of the mass civil-rights movement in the South. Zachary James Watkins' 2017 "Peace Be Till" (an excerpt) allowed for contemplation of the live musical performance as the words of Martin Luther King Jr.'s counselor and close friend Dr. Clarence B. Jones were heard in his own voice. 

The concert opened with the raucous energy of Osvaldo Golijov's arrangement of a Mexican song, "El Sinaloense" (The Man from Sinaloa), an imitation of the inebriated good cheer reflected in the original. The textures were cluttered and rhythmically propulsive.

The deftness of Kronos programming was assured in the choice of Gabriella Smith's "Keep Going," an upbeat representation of one woman's service to a songbird research project, in which the quartet mimicked birdsong with appropriate instruments, blended with their conventional ensemble. The larger significance of the work is reflected in narrative elements that offer the audience visions of how to save the world through individual effort combined toward a common goal.

The Watkins piece partnered aptly with Antonio Haskell's "God Shall Wipe All Tears Away," a tribute arranged by Jacob Garchik inspired by Mahalia Jackson. With the hushed, distant-sounding accompaniment of his colleagues, the violist ardently represented the devout vocalism of the Queen of Gospel, including her often delicately applied ornamentation. 

Further outreach of the sort that Kronos has long stood for came after intermission. The visionary jazz bandleader Sun Ra, in an arrangement by the Gary composer Jlin, was placed by his work "Maji" in a good light shimmering with motoric energy. And the seminal pop star Laurie Anderson made an appearance, in another Garchik arrangement, with "Flow," an exercise in settled calm that made a worthy yet too slight prelude to the upsetting history lesson the audience received in "Silent Cranes." 

As Harrington told me in February 1989, "It's hard for us to make a program these days. We're always excluding something." No wonder  he says, in a short 50th-anniversary film shown just before the concert Wednesday, that he could live 500 years and never run out of new music worth submitting to Kronos treatment with his colleagues. It's easy to wish this trailblazing quartet more realistic longevity, which it already exemplifies.