Early Music

"The modern-instrument Kronos Quartet adapt their playing style to suit whichever period is to hand - or at least that appears to be the general rule. Perotin's multi-paragraph Viderunt omnes is delivered without vibrato and with the kind of phrasal emphases that any conscientious early music vocal group might employ, but Hildegard of Bingen's O virtus sapientae - which is an even earlier piece than the Perotin - shimmers to expressive vibrato and great warmth of tone. Scholarly exegesis is plainly less of an issue for Kronos than the effective juxtaposition of ancient with modern or earth with spirit, as when Dowland's Lachrimae Antiquae succeeds David Lamb's Langdans efter Byfans Mats (with its droning bagpipe), and Part's halting Psalom is tailed by Harry Partch's snazzy Studies on Ancient Greek Scales and the hopping Long-Ge by Jack Body, replete with colourful harmonics. The chordal clashes in Guillaume de Machaut (which serve throughout the disc as a sort of ritornello) emerge out of Cage, converge with Swedish folk music or transport us to one of Purcell's greatest fantazias (No. 2), while Christopher Tye prefaces Schnittke's searingly intense Collected songs where every verse is filled with grief and Schnittke himself fades to silence and the eventual Tolling of the knell (excerpted from a Requiem Mass performed by the Monks of the Abbey of St Peter's of Solesmes, France). There are gravelly Tuvanese voices draped by strings, the exotic tones of a Swedish nyckelharpa, a zhong ruan in Dowland and Marja Mutru's harmonium in Machaut. The sequence is its own story, and the story itself will vary according to each listener's individual sensibilities or imagination."
(Gramophone Dec 1997)