You've got to hand it to
the Kronos Quartet. They've figured it out: you play a piece because it's great, not because it's part of the string quartet repertoire, or even because it's "classical." If that means a concert program that features works by both
Bo Diddley and
Alfred Schnittke, so be it. They've also figured out that once you hook audiences by playing string quartet arrangements of
Bo Diddley, you can use the profits to commission pieces from the best living composers, and those same audiences will then sit and listen to them. This, more than anything else, constitutes
the Kronos Quartet's great contribution to classical music. In typical
Kronos style,
Short Stories is a wildly varying amalgam of pieces; it ranges from modern but sober compositions by
Henry Cowell and
Sofia Gubaidulina to a cartoon-music experiment by downtown icon
John Zorn (in honor of
Carl Stalling, who wrote the music to most of the Bugs Bunny cartoons) and
Elliott Sharp's "Digital," a piece for string-quartet-as-percussion-ensemble. Frankly, those are the pieces that work the best. The arrangement of
Willie Dixon's Chicago blues classic "Spoonful" is better in theory than in practice, and there are a few other slow points as well. But that's the risk you take with this group, and it's worth it. ~ Rick Anderson