Festival review: Chamber Landscapes — Horizons
Peerless as a musical innovator, David Harrington stepped outside his usual role as first violinist of the Kronos Quartet to curate a series of exploratory concerts in UKARIA’s Chamber Landscapes. It could not have been more stimulating.
Seeing David Harrington in action is to witness musical collaboration from the master. His legacy as the longstanding first violinist and driver behind Kronos Quartet is unrivalled in terms of the sheer diversity of musicians he has brought into the sphere of influence of that legendary San Franciscan group.
Its spread of activity over the decades has been wider and more impressive than that of any other classical group, bar none.
Many will remember Kronos from their appearance at the 2023 Adelaide Festival, when they played George Crumb’s Black Angels – the avant-garde 1970s piece that inspired Harrington to start the group. From that piece they went on to tackle them all, from Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie to Björk.
To have Harrington curating Chamber Landscapes at UKARIA in this year’s festival was always going to be fascinating, even if he didn’t play one note himself on the violin. Rather, his mission was to collect some of his most admired collaborators from around the globe and supply them with a swirl of inspiration.
Most had worked with Kronos before. In Saturday’s ‘Bridges’ concert, Vietnamese zither player Vân-Ánh Võ joined Indonesian singer Peni Candra Rini and Trio Da Kali from Mali —who also made an appearance at this year’s WOMADelaide.
Many of the line-up had never met before, and few even shared a common language. However, their brief was simple: to meet, mix and experiment through a shared understanding of music.
Vân-Ánh Võ proved to be a musician of the finest poise. Playing the đàn bầu, a one-string zither equipped with a vertical tuning rod that she manipulated with wondrous control like a magic wand, she empathetically reached out to her fellow musicians around her in a series of beautifully conceived improvisations.
First came her own arrangement of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3, with Melbourne musician Chloë Sobek partnering on laptop and six-stringed violone. Throbbing electronic sounds from the former and gentle pizzicato notes from the latter opened the way for Vân-Ánh’s single-voiced purity on this divine traditional Vietnamese instrument.
She traced her way through Satie’s meandering melody with a feeling of total discovery. One realised just how expressive a single string can be in highly skilled hands such as hers. Guitarists would be humbled.
Interest heightens dramatically when two musicians of comparable ability join on stage. From Java, Peni Candra Rini is another consummate artist, with the difference that she traverses contemporary vocal techniques as well as traditional folk singing.
Dialoguing is what Rini excels at, gathering tremendous intensity while bouncing off others on stage. With Trio Da Kali’s singer Hawa Diabaté, it was extreme sorrow in utterances of lament that seemed to tear her soul in half, but for the sublime warmth of Diabaté’s answering phrases.
Another, funnier dialogue saw her advancing barefoot and with hands outstretched towards Trio Da Kali’s Mamadou Kouyaté. In a crescendo of seduction, he just stood by, wryly smiling and strumming his ngoni – a goat-skin-covered, plucked instrument with a remarkably deep bass for its size.
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When the stakes are raised, success isn’t always guaranteed. Mahler’s orchestral song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (‘I am lost to the world’) presents a wholly different aesthetic that lends itself less to adaptation. Melbourne’s Affinity Quartet joined Vân-Ánh in this song of deep introspection, and their string textures felt thin though generally right. A soprano would have sustained its melody more effectively than zither.
Affinity Quartet were right at home in the ‘Continents’ concert in Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 11, ‘Jabiru Dreaming’. Rhythms were clean and their neat, compact performance was particularly satisfying. Affinity carve off anything indulgent, much to their credit.
Horizons curator David Harrington. Photo: Danica Taylor / Supplied
Then it was the Australian String Quartet’s turn with a piece by the Irish violist-composer Garth Knox. His Satellites is an exhilarating exploration of bowing techniques, and it’s a piece that Kronos have made their own. The marvel was to hear ASQ also do it so exceptionally well. With tightly choreographed bowing, Satellites musically describes how physical motion aboard orbiting bodies is so very different from how it is on Earth. Its ending is quite hilarious, the players swishing their bows in unison.
ASQ, of course, are an experimental force in their own right, and it shows – as did their much-admired collaboration with Lou Bennett and Paul Stanhope in nyilamum – song cycles, earlier in the Festival.
Lastly came some Bach, courtesy again of Affinity Quartet but this time with Lassana Diabaté, Trio Da Kali’s balafon (marimba) player. Here was probably the most courageous moment in Chamber Landscapes. Selections of the Goldberg Variations, transferred to string quartet, were interspersed with improvised “responses” from Diabaté. It all sounded very spur-of-the-moment and rather unequal as a collaboration: he had to do all the hard work. But what a joy it was to hear his quirky rhythms and delicate runs across his instrument – and see his smiling face.
A more stimulating pair of concerts was unimaginable.
This is a review of ‘Bridges’ and ‘Continents’ in Horizons: curated by David Harrington, Chamber Landscapes 2025 on March 8 at UKARIA Cultural Centre
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview