Kronos Quartet presents 4th Annual Hometown Music Festival This April

The San Francisco-based, Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet / Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA) presents its fourth annual hometown music festival Kronos Festival 2018. With six concerts over three days, Kronos Festival 2018 illustrates one of the group's central artistic tenets: collaboration. After Kronos performed at NPR Music's 10th anniversary concert last month, NPR Music's Tom Huizenga wrote, "Collaboration. It's in the DNA of the intrepid Kronos Quartet, which some 40 years ago began working with composers around the globe to spotlight new music."

With Kronos taking center stage for three evening concerts and a family matinee, the festival introduces a number of new Kronos collaborators, including Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi and Egyptian electro-chaabi pioneer Islam Chipsy. Kronos also presents pieces from longtime artistic partners, such as Aleksandra Vrebalov and Philip Glass. Joining Kronos throughout the festival are guest musicians from around the world.

Together for the first time since the release of their joint album Ladilikan on World Circuit Records last fall, Kronos and the Malian griot ensemble Trio Da Kali perform music from the LP that topped several year-end best-of lists, including Songlines magazine, fRoots magazine, and the Transglobal World Music Chart. NPR's All Things Considered called the album "mesmerizing" and declared that "Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet shatter boundaries of culture, genre, faith and ethnicity - all with an ease that must be heard to be believed." Returning from previous festivals are Zakir Hussain, Mahsa Vahdat, Vân-Ánh Võ and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, conducted by Valérie Sainte-Agathe. Kronos also unveils an exciting new project with genre-bending singer-songwriter Jolie Holland. Additional guests will be announced.

This year's festival highlights the expansive sonic worlds of David Coulter,who serves as the festival's artist-in-residence. The British-born, Bay Area-based multidisciplinary artist, musician, composer, director and educator has worked with Kronos since the 1990s. Known for his work with The Pogues, Tom Waits, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, Beck and Gorillaz, as well as his theatrical scores, including A.C.T.'s recent production of "A Thousand Splendid Suns," Coulter will be featured throughout the festival. He will perform a special concert on Saturday with Iranian-American composer and keyboardist Sahba Aminikia, percussion and electric guitar duo The Living Earth Show and sound artist bran(...)pos (a.k.a. Jake Rodriguez).

"It is both thrilling and a great honor to have been invited by Kronos Quartet to be artist-in-residence for this festival," says Coulter. "Each time I have collaborated with them it has been an exhilarating voyage into the unknown. We share a sense of adventure and are not afraid of taking risks. As a musician, I am an improviser with a very strong sense of ritual. I look at my work as sonic meditation, a musical exploration of resonance, playing with time, a creation of space, an exploration of emotions to create vivid images. To be given the opportunity to spend several days sharing a stage with some of the most magical performers I know is a fabulous gift."

"Kronos Festival 2018is a giant leap for our work," says David Harrington, Kronos' artistic director, founder and violinist. "We are building on previous Kronos Festivals, deepening relationships, alerting our audience to some ideas from diverse corners of the world of music, celebrating possibilities recently revealed to us. I hope our audiences will be emboldened, energized and thrilled by the amazing range of work that is currently possible."

A thread woven throughout the festival is Kronos' Fifty for the Future open access education initiative, which is commissioning-and distributing for free-a learning library of contemporary repertoire. Eleven of these 50 commissions will be performed by Kronos and, fittingly, by the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts' Dragon String Quartet and the Bay Area-based ensemble Amaranth Quartet, which, from its founding in 2013, has shown a commitment to commissioning and premiering new music.

Additional program highlights include Kronos and Coulter's tribute to the memory of musical legend and friend Ralph Carney with a performance of Carney's Lament for Charleston. Kronos also gives the West Coast premiere of Peace Be Till by Oakland-based composer Zachary James Watkins. Commissioned by and recently debuted at Carnegie Hall, Peace Be Till is inspired by the moment Mahalia Jackson prompted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to go off script during his "I Have a Dream" speech. The composition features the voice of Dr. King's speechwriter and friend Dr. Clarence B. Jones, who is a visiting professor at the University of San Francisco and a scholar in residence at Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Additional programming and program details will be announced this spring.

PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

Thursday, April 26, 7:30pm: Opening Night

Kronos Quartet with David Coulter and guests Mahsa Vahdat and Zakir Hussain

Program to include:

Islam Chipsy (arr. Jacob Garchik) / Zaghlala **

Zakir Hussain / Pallavi ** World Premiere with special guest Zakir Hussain, tabla

Ralph Carney (arr. Danny Clay) / Lament for Charleston + with special guest David Coulter

Kronos Quartet, Mahsa Vahdat and David Coulter World Premiere

Friday, April 27, 7:30pm: Day 2

Kronos Quartet with David Coulter and guests Trio Da Kali and Jolie Holland, plus a special appearance by the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts' Dragon String Quartet

Program to include:

Fodé Lassana Diabaté (arr. Jacob Garchik) / Sunjata's Time: 5. Bara Kala Ta **Performed by Asawa SOTA's Dragon String Quartet

Guillermo Galindo / Remote Control ** World Premiere

Philip Glass / Quartet Satz **

Kronos Quartet, Jolie Holland and David Coulter World Premiere

Kronos Quartet and Trio Da Kali

Saturday, April 28, 11am: Family Concert: Around the World with Kronos

An hour-long, family-friendly concert featuring a mix of lively and eclectic music from all over the world.

Saturday, April 28, 2pm: Amaranth Quartet Plays Kronos' Fifty for the Future

Music by Fodé Lassana Diabaté, Rhiannon Giddens, Garth Knox, Nicole Lizée and Aleksandra Vrebalov composed for Kronos' open access education initiative.

Saturday, April 28, 5pm: David Coulter & Friends

Artist-in-residence showcase featuring David Coulter performing with Sahba Aminikia, The Living Earth Show and bran(...)pos.

Saturday, April 28, 7:30pm: Day 3
Kronos Quartet with David Coulter and guests San Francisco Girls Chorus and Vân-Ánh Võ

Program to include:

Yevgeniy Sharlat / pencil sketch **

Zachary James Watkins / Peace Be Till * West Coast Premiere

Aftab Darvishi / Daughters of Sol **

David Coulter (arr. Sahba Aminikia) / music from A Thousand Splendid Suns with special guest David Coulter

Aleksandra Vrebalov / Missa Supratext * World Premiere with special guests San Francisco Girls Chorus, conducted by Valérie Sainte-Agathe; and David Coulter

Kronos Quartet and Vân-Ánh Võ World Premiere

Additional programming to be announced. Program subject to change.

* Written for Kronos / ** Composed for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire / + Arranged for Kronos

KRONOS FESTIVAL 2018 is produced by the Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA) and is part of the San Francisco-based 501(c)3 nonprofit's KRONOS PRESENTS program. It is made possible with generous support from San Francisco Grants for the Arts, The Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, Meyer Sound, The Bernard Osher Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, EACH Foundation, Aga Khan Music Initiative and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University, with additional support provided by KPAA's Board of Directors.

ABOUT THE KRONOS QUARTET

For more than 40 years, San Francisco's Kronos Quartet-David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)-has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world's most celebrated and influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts, releasing more than 60 recordings, collaborating with many of the world's most intriguing and accomplished composers and performers, and commissioning over 900 works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos has received over 40 awards, including the Polar Music and Avery Fisher Prizes, two of the most prestigious awards given to musicians.

Integral to Kronos' work is a series of long-running collaborations with many of the world's foremost composers, including Americans Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich; Azerbaijan's Franghiz Ali-Zadeh; Russia's Vladimir Martynov; Poland's Henryk Górecki; and Serbian-American Aleksandra Vrebalov. Additional collaborators have included Wu Man, Laurie Anderson, Tanya Tagaq, Mahsa Vahdat, Trevor Paglen, Sam Green, Van Dyke Parks, múm, Dawn Upshaw, Noam Chomsky, Tom Waits, Asha Bhosle, Taraf de Haïdouks, and Howard Zinn.

On tour for five months per year, Kronos appears in the world's most prestigious concert halls, clubs, and festivals. Kronos is equally prolific and wide-ranging on recordings, including the Grammy and Latin Grammy-nominated Nuevo (2002) and the 2004 Grammy-winner Alban Berg's Lyric Suite. Kronos' most recent releases include the One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley box set; Folk Songs, featuring Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, Rhiannon Giddens, and Natalie Merchant singing traditional songs; the collaborative album Ladilikan with Trio Da Kali, an ensemble of Malian griot musicians assembled by Aga Khan Music Initiative; and the forthcoming collaborative album Landfallwith Laurie Anderson.

The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association manages all aspects of Kronos' work, including the commissioning of new works, concert tours and home season performances, education programs, and a self-produced Kronos Festival. In 2015, Kronos launched Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, an education and legacy project that is commissioning-and distributing for free-the first learning library of contemporary repertoire for string quartet.

ABOUT David Coulter

David Coulter is an English-born multidisciplinary artist, musician, composer, director, and educator based in the Bay Area. Since the 1980s, he has directed shows, produced records, and played his musical saw and other assorted weird and less-weird instruments in studios, theaters, and stages and on recordings around the world with the likes of The Pogues, Tom Waits and Robert Wilson, Kronos Quartet, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, Hal Willner, Beck and Gorillaz. Coulter curates and directs numerous multi-artist events. Credits include Monkey: Journey to the West (Gorillaz and Chen Shi-Zheng), Double Fantasy Live, Rain Dogs Revisited, Discreet + Oblique: The Music of Brian Eno, Twisted Christmas, In Dreams: David Lynch Revisited, Improbable's The Eldership Project, and An Anatomy Act. His most recent project, Jim Jarmusch Revisited, premiered at Philharmonie de Paris and London's Barbican. He was associate musical director and multi-instrumentalist on The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets at A.C.T in 2004. In 2016, he wrote and performed original scores for A Thousand Splendid Suns and Hamlet, both directed by Carey Perloff. The score to A Thousand Splendid Suns won a Betty Award for Best Original Score. He is a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has played the didgeridoo at the invitation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on a number of official occasions.

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