Kronos Quartet - Black Angels / vinyl 2LP set

First released in 1990, the album features David Harrington (violin), John Sherba, (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Joan Jeanrenaud (cello) performing George Crumb’s title piece, which inspired Harrington to found the quartet in 1973, and works by Charles Ives, István Márta, Thomas Tallis, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Crumb’s title piece, called “an unusually elevated and searing Vietnam War protest” by the New York Times, sets a dark, powerful tone for this collection, which addresses the political/physical/spiritual consequences of war.

The fourth side of the vinyl edition is an etching of an illustration created especially for this purpose by Matt Mahurin, whose work is featured on the original album cover. “Stylishly packaged, intelligently programmed, superbly recorded and brilliantly performed,” proclaimed Gramophone. “In short, very much the sort of disc we’ve come to expect from the talented and imaginative Kronos Quartet.” The Evening Standard included it among its “100 Definitive Classical Albums of the 20th Century.”

“Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world,” George Crumb wrote in 1986, as cited in the album notes. “The work portrays a voyage of the soul … The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These ‘magical’ relationships are variously expressed; e.g. in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc.”