The Kronos Quartet Plays Carnegie Hall, 5/3

Kronos Quartet brings an eclectic program to Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall on Friday, May 3 (9 pm). A highlight is the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli's You Know Me From Here, a major statement from the 32-year-old composer. According to Mazzoli, the 20-minute work is "about loss, but in the most positive sense; it speaks of the loss of our old selves, the jumps into the unknown, the leaps of faith we all must make and the beautiful moments when we find solace in a person, in an idea, or in music itself. The music itself shifts constantly from earthy, gritty gestures to soaring, leaping melodies that rarely land where we expect." It is her second piece for Kronos, following Harp and Altar (2009), which The New York Times cited as "further evidence that [Mazzoli] is among the more consistently inventive and surprising composers now working in New York."

Mazzoli has emerged as one of the leading voices of her generation: the Wall Street Journal called her chamber opera Song from the Uproar "both powerful and new," and The New York Times claimed that "in the electric surge of Ms. Mazzoli's score you felt the joy, risk and limitless potential of free spirits unbound." The composer's 2013-14 season will include premieres of new works for pianist Emanuel Ax and the Detroit Symphony. She is also an active pianist and keyboardist, and has performed around the world with her ensemble Victoire.

The program also features the New York premiere of Aleksandra Vrebalov's Babylon, Our Own, an expansive 35-minute score for clarinet and string quartet, with polystylistic virtuoso David Krakauer as guest soloist. Says Vrebalov, "I imagine the single-movement form of Babylon, Our Own unfolding like a ritual, carrying one through a vast range of memories and visions triggered by pre-recorded documentary audio materials. Filtered and manipulated to different levels of abstraction, pre-recorded sounds include snippets of friends' voices speaking their names, New York City street noise, Kronos Quartet and David Krakauer rehearsing the piece, gatherings of groups in religious fervor, the prayers of the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and the Orthodox Patriarch, Morse code, as well as my grandmother reciting the poetry she had learned as a child in the 1930s." Born in Serbia and based in New York, Vrebalov has a longstanding relationship with Kronos, starting with Pannonia Boundless (1998) and continuing with ...hold me neighbor, in this storm... (2008), which has remained a frequent staple of the group's programs.

Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov's String Quartet No. 3, commissioned by Kronos and premiered last year in London, also makes its New York debut on this program. Like his contemporaries Schnittke, Martynov, and Pärt, Silvestrov (b. 1937 in Kiev) has traced a path from complex modernism to an idiom that references historical styles in a deeply personal way. "I do not write new music," Silvestrov has said. "My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists." Writes musicologist Greg Dubinsky, "Silvestrov wants melody in his music to awake in listeners a sense of welcome, of discovering something already half-known or somehow intuited. The two poles of Silvestrov's musical personality alternate throughout the quartet. Despite their superficial differences, both the unsettling labyrinth of atonal harmonies and the hesitations of the tonal melodies embody the composer's sense of human fragility."

Rounding out the program is an arrangement by Jacob Garchik of Laurie Anderson's lyrical and reflective Flow, an instrumental composition first heard on her Grammy-nominated album Homeland (2010).

T H E P R O G R A M A T - A - G L A N C E

Missy Mazzoli: You Know Me From Here World premiere

I. Lift Your Fists
II. Everything That Rises Must Converge
III. You Know Me From Here

Laurie Anderson (arr. Jacob Garchik): Flow

Valentin Silvestrov: String Quartet No. 3 New York premiere

I. Präludium / Prelude
II. Pastorale
III. Intermezzo
IV. Intermezzo
V. Serenade
VI. Intermezzo
VII. Postludium / Postlude

Aleksandra Vrebalov: Babylon, Our Own New York premiere
with special guest David Krakauer, clarinet