The Kronos Quartet is adding to its extraordinary 42-year-long record of fostering new music with thousands of performances around the world, 50 CDs, and 850 commissions by presenting its "second annual hometown music festival celebrating musical voices and traditions from around the world."
Announced today, Kronos Festival 2016: Explorer Series will have seven concerts within a four-day period, Feb. 4-7, all at SFJAZZ. Ticket prices start at $15.
Virtuoso pipa player Wu Man is artist-in-residence for the festival, which includes four world premieres, two U.S. premieres, four West Coast premieres, and two S.F. premieres.
Guest performers are David Coulter (born in the UK), Fodé Lassana Diabaté (Mali), Ritva Koistinen (Finland), Mariana Sadovska (born in Ukraine), and Vân-Ánh Võ (born in Vietnam). The San Francisco Girls Chorus and musicians from Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts will join Kronos onstage to perform commissioned works, and the festival culminates in a daytime family concert celebrating the Lunar New Year.
Concert programs feature new and recent works by internationally-renowned contemporary composers, including Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Sahba Aminikia, Donnacha Dennehy, Philip Glass, Nicole Lizée, Karin Rehnqvist, and Aleksandra Vrebalov. In many of these works, the sounds of the string quartet blend with traditional instruments such as the West African balafon, the Indian harmonium, the Chinese pipa, the Finnish kantele, and the Vietnamese Ðàn Tranh (17-string zither).
Mariana Sadovska’s Chernobyl.The Harvest reflects on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster in the composer’s native Ukraine, drawing on themes from traditional songs, rituals, and ceremonies to create a work of healing and renewal. Sahba Aminikia’s Sound, Only Sound Remains explores the forbidden sound of women singing in public in modern-day Iran, their recorded voices interwoven with Kronos’ sound.
Donnacha Dennehy’s One Hundred Goodbyes remembers some of the forgotten sean nós songs and Gaelic speech of his homeland. Innovative arrangements for Kronos of traditional and popular music from Sweden, India, Mexico, and other countries complement the new compositions on the programs.
Kronos Festival 2016: Explorer Series also marks the Bay Area debut of the Kronos Performing Arts Association's new education program, "Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire." Beginning in the 2015-16 season, Kronos’ "Fifty for the Future" will commission 50 new works — 10 per year for five years, by 25 women and 25 men — devoted to contemporary approaches to the quartet, and designed expressly for the training of students and emerging professionals.
The first 10 composers were announced early in 2015, and the festival will feature three of these new works, by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (world premiere), Fodé Lassana Diabaté, and Wu Man, both performed in the Bay Area for the first time.