MUSIC REVIEWS : Kronos Quartet at County Museum

If you had questions about the Kronos phenomenon, many of them could have been answered Monday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Certainly the impact of the quartet’s popularity was immediately apparent in a Bing Theater crowd easily twice the size and probably half the average age of the usual Monday Evening Concert audience.

The typically generous, wide-ranging program made the basis of that appeal obvious, as did the presentation, a thoughtfully staged performance of eloquence and controlled passion with no glitches in sound or lighting.

The world premiere on the agenda, however, was something of a disappointment. John Zorn’s music has been important for Kronos, but his String Quartet--a 20-year-old relic of the composer at 19--lacks the edge of his latter pieces for them.

Steve Mackey’s jumping arrangement of Raymond Scott’s “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s slowly expanding “Dilogy” made strong impressions in their local premieres. The former revealed Kronos in its most energized pop mode, while the latter displayed their ability to sustain incremental developments of a repressed sound world.

The other local premiere was Cecilie Ore’s “Praesens Subitus,” a recursive study in quivering glissandos overlong for its two contrasting gestures.

The Kronos idea of classics includes Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful”--the Howlin’ Wolf performance transcribed as a strangely under-powered textural tour de force by Mackey--and Henry Cowell’s “Quartet Euphometric.” Both received intense, purposeful playing.

Gorecki’s stark “Already It Is Dusk” showed Kronos’ authority with larger forms, and commitment to crunching contrasts of delicacy and obsessive furies. Kaija Saariaho’s “Nymphea,” with its haunted electronic shadows and whisperings, proved a rather macabre sonic playground. Scott Johnson’s now expanded “How It Happens,” with irony the interface between potent post-modern music and the recorded voice of I.F. Stone, seemed altogether more imposing than it had a year ago at the Wadsworth Theatre.

In encore Kronos dipped into its bottomless bag of musical goodies, for Foday Musa Suso’s “Sunset” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.”