MUSIC REVIEWS : Kronos Quartet Conveys Emotion of Schnittke Works

When Alfred Schnittke turns 60 this week, he will have spent 55 years of his life as a Soviet citizen, 41 of them as a musician in that defunct system. Yet, if one feels awkward in calling him a Russian composer, he certainly cannot be classified as anything else. And his music seems to prove this.

Playing its second of three Southern California concerts over the weekend, the Kronos Quartet brought together Schnittke’s four string quartets in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA Friday night.

These works, written in 1966, 1980, 1983 and 1989, respectively, are in a Shostakovichian tradition, to be sure, but also follow models by earlier Russians in their often morose, utterly sincere rhetoric. Each seems to have its own unique Schnittkean character, yet family resemblances abound.

Not to waffle: In the Kronos members’ musical perspective and technical accomplishment, these performances achieved a definitive plateau. Emotionally engrossing, colorfully varied, thoughtfully paced and deeply probed, these readings explored the composer’s world comprehensively and in myriad details.

Because Kronos--violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud--has analyzed, dissected, dug into and conquered all this music, the listener had but to receive the aural pictures here encoded: deep sadness in a sigh of resignation, thwarted fury, an hysterical, desperate ride across the steppes, extended cries of pain, bitter ironies, folkloric reminiscences, hymns of survival. In all, a generous, gripping evening that even seemed short.