Kronos Quartet Celebrates 40-Year Anniversary at Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival

Free outdoor performances featuring world-class artists have been a perfect summer recipe for the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival for 43 years now. But this year’s festival, which begins Wednesday and runs through Aug. 11, is promising a little something extra: five days of programming marking the 40^th anniversary of the renowned Kronos Quartet.

Bill Bragin, Lincoln Center’s director of public programming, said the Kronos at 40 celebration was a happy meeting of artistic minds. “The Kronos Quartet has accomplished so much at so many different levels. We wanted to do something really special for the 40^th anniversary here,” Bragin said. “One thing we had never done before was to turn over part of our season to a co-curator. But based on our personal rapport as well as the artistic product we knew we were in sync and would collaborate really well. “The important thing for (Lincoln Center) was that it not feel like Kronos would just be here as resident performers but that they really be curators and that the programming would reflect their sensibility and their role as commissioners and collaborators.”

The celebration begins Wednesday with “Ritual Cyclical,” a work by choreographer Mark Dendy that will feature 80 dancers performing to classic recordings by the Kronos Quartet. The piece, which will be performed at 6 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, will use the main plaza space as well as surrounding areas on the Lincoln Center campus.  The Kronos Quartet will actually perform live at several of the celebration’s events including a celebration of Afrobeat king Fela Anikulapo Kuti Wednesday evening and collaboration with Ukrainian singer Mariana Sadovska on Thursday evening, both at 7:30 p.m.

The festival isn’t all about Kronos Quartet. Other performers scheduled during the rest of the festival include choreographer Kyle Abraham (Aug. 1), “A Tale of Two Nations”—featuring percussionists and dancers from the Northeastern Brazil Carnaval champions and their New York counterparts (July 30, Aug. 1 and 2), and the Rockin’ Rockabilly Revue (Aug. 10). Times and locations vary although most of the evening performances will be held at the Damrosch Park Bandshell off West 62^nd and Columbus Avenue. All performances are free and open to the public.

For Kronos, the Lincoln Center collaboration was a special artistic opportunity, said Kronos artistic director and co-founder David Harrington. “From my standpoint and the standpoint of Kronos and the work we do, the opportunity to cast five shows in New York City at Lincoln Center that we curate and program, and where we get to invite our favorite musicians from all over the place, was all just too good to be true,” Harrington said. “As a way of beginning the 40^th year of Kronos I can’t think of a better way to do it.”

Harrington said each day’s performances has special meaning to the group. The Fela concert, for example, will not only provide something of a preview of a forthcoming Kronos album but involves an AIDS awareness charity that is a Kronos favorite. On Saturday afternoon, the quartet will participate in a special Play-Along Concert with educator and musician Craig Woodson during which the audience will be invited to play their own homemade instruments with Kronos.

“I’m really looking forward to (the Play-Along Concert) so much. Craig is someone Kronos has worked with for over 20 years,” Harrington said. “There may be lots of kids joining us and playing with us on instruments they’ve made. It’s so much fun and empowering. It’s important to know that music can be made from all sorts of objects.”

Projects like that show one way in which Kronos has succeeded at its original mission to celebrate music from other cultures and traditions.  “From the beginning we tried to perform all sorts of things to bring more of the modern world into the realm of string quartets. Basically I’ve spent every day for the last 40 years trying to do that,” Harrington said. “We’ve done more than 800 pieces from men and women, from many different cultures and backgrounds and religions, all sorts of languages, by many different instruments. Culturally we’ve brought some of the world into this realm of string quartet music.”

But he noted that another Kronos goal has not yet been reached. “I was hoping we could create a kind of music that was so powerful that was so powerful and so strong that it could actually protect people from harm, from violence and wars,” Harrington said. “We have not been successful in that yet. But I believe that the best note has not been written yet and I don’t think the best note has been played yet.”

For information and a full schedule for the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, which runs July 24-Aug. 11, go online at LCOutOfDoors.org.

— Karyn D. Collins