Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Last Night in L.A. - Hooray for Bollywood

The evening was billed as �Kronos Quartet & Asha Bhosle: India Calling: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood�, but this turned out to be just the second half of the concert at UCLA�s Royce Hall. "Bollywood" is yet another truck stop on the Kronos Quartet�s stimulating and seemingly inexhaustible quest for new music thrills. And, of course, the program helps promote their newest recording, �You�ve Stolen My Heart� with Bhosle singing the music of famed Indian movie composer Burman accompanied by the Kronos. This Amazon page provides clips from all but one of the tracks, so you can get a feeling for the sound. The Kronos on stage is supplemented by a pipa and the tables and by lots of tape and amplification.

I am quite unfamiliar with Indian music in general and Indian film music in particular and I must confess that I had never heard of R. D. Burman. Nor had I heard of Asha Bhosle, although a recording or two might have been background music at an Indian restaurant; I certainly had no idea that she was the most recorded vocalist in the world. But David Harrington of Kronos had, and felt that exploring this music would be right for Kronos in their 32nd year.

Harrington said he thought Burman could be compared with Stravinsky. While I wasn�t convinced of that, I certainly felt last night that Burman could be compared to Gershwin. Being present with Asha Bhosle singing Berman songs was like being at a concert with Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin: a consummate musician, fully in control of her material and her sound, even with a cough from foggy San Francisco, with a voice, at 72, that might have lost some of its upper register but was still right on pitch unless she purposely wanted to use microtones. This Asha Bhosle site includes a number of complete Bhosle recordings, with several composers as well as R. D. Burman, for those interested in further exposure to her voice; the site also includes an essay worth reading by her daughter.

While this was interesting, and fun, for me the highlight of the concert was the first half and the performance of Terry Riley�s new work, The Cusp of Magic, a piece written for the Kronos to perform with the extraordinary Wu Man on pipa. The Chinese lute has more than a 3-octave range of pitch and, with an artist like Wu Man, a great range of sound color. The work is one of Riley�s great works, rich, textured, well-conceived. Forty years ago Terry Riley was able to express one powerful concept with amazing clarity in a work called �In C�. His work still has great clarity while it now has a much wider range of expression. (He isn�t a minimalist any more, of course.) KQED has an excellent video of Riley and the Kronos working on the composition and practice of �Magic�, and it�s well worth watching, here. There is also a good summary of the work. Wouldn�t it make a fine festival to have someone reprise the now-sixteen works written by Riley for Kronos?

Kronos performed this program at Yerba Buena in San Francisco two nights ago. It will also be performed in London at the Barbican, and, in March, at Zankel Hall at Carnegie. You New Yorkers should try to go. And there are still a few tickets left to hear the Phil�s Minimalist Jukebox festival at the end of March.

posted by Jerry Zinser 9/25/2005