Kronos Quartet
“This album served as a kind of audio business card for Kronos in 1988. It announced to anyone listening that Kronos was prepared to claim huge swaths of musical territory for the string quartet, for the first time. NY downtown hero John Zorn, Lounge Lizards founder John Lurie, minimalist founder Terry Riley, and Nuevo tango king Astor Piazzolla were all represented. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (in its original quartet form) is also here, as if to say that the acknowledged classics and these newer excursions were all equally absorbing. And then there’s the title track. 98 seconds of glowing choral music with strings and pump organ by Finland’s Aulis Sallinen which stands among his finest moments, and Kronos’s too.”
David Harrington on the making of Winter Was Hard, Kronos’ third full-length for Nonesuch Records: “All the while I was puzzling, how do we organize this mass of musical information into coherent experiences? With our concerts in those days, in the mid-80s, there were just so many ideas that we were experimenting with. Then it was the same way with the albums… If you go back and listen to our early albums for Nonesuch, what I love about them is that you never know what is going to happen next.”
SELECT CREDITS
Kronos Quartet
David Harrington, violin
John Sherba, violin
Hank Dutt, viola
Joan Jeanrenaud, cello
San Francisco Girls Chorus, Elizabeth Appling, director
Earl L. Miller, reed organ
Ohta Hiromi, voice
Christian Marclay, turntables
Produced by Judith Sherman and Kronos Quartet, except Forbidden Fruit produced by John Zorn
Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz
Released by Nonesuch Records
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