Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11 –
review
Barbican Hall, London

Guy Dammann
guardian.co.uk,
Friday 27 January 2012 18.25 GMT

Initially performed in San Francisco on the fifth anniversary of the
9/11 attacks, the Kronos Quartet’s Awakening concert was recreated in
New York last year for the 10th anniversary. In many respects a
typical Kronos enterprise, with the musical elements structured as a
continuum and presented on a darkened stage amid a tangle of
industrial detritus, this was its first UK performance.

Given the context, the fact that the concert’s first sound comes from
the oud, an Arabic instrument, might have proved rather a surprising
awakening. Accompanied by a drone, the taped instruments were
eventually joined by the cellist’s lonely call for the title work, by
the Uzbek composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky. It was a stirring beginning
to a programme that swelled into a kind of triptych, moving from east
to west. Only a portion of the music was specifically composed for the
anniversary, and some of the most affecting pieces – such as Jacob
Garchik’s arrangement of an Iranian lullaby and Aulis Sallinen’s
Winter Was Hard (sung here by the New London Children’s Choir) – were
derived from music much older than the current century and its sorry
beginning.

Extracts from Michael Gordon’s The Sad Park, featuring
electro-acoustic riffs on children’s responses to the attacks, formed
the centrepiece, while the spiritual centre was really provided by the
shift from Kronos’ arrangement of Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1980s
classic Armenia – in which distorted, amplified strings scream angrily
to the accompaniment of metal being pounded and torn by an
angle-grinder – to Terry Riley’s hypnotic One Earth, One People, One
Love. Despite unavoidable flecks of hippy kitsch, the whole concert
did succeed in radiating this mantra, somehow tapping into the slow,
ancient rhythm of our common civilisation, swallowing up its recent
grief. It may seem a small gesture – given the rampaging political
idiocies of the last decade – but every little helps.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress