Kronos Quartet
Plays Sigur Rós (MP3s)

307452

Track Listing

Click tracks with speaker icon to listen

1	Flugufrelsarinn (Sigur Rós, arr. S. Prutsman)	8:22
2	The Star-Spangled Banner (Trad., arr. S. Prutsman after Jimi Hendrix)	3:41

News & Reviews

Monday, January 5, 2009

Nonesuch Artists Continue to Draw Year-End Accolades

Since the last Nonesuch Journal entry of 2008, which laid out scores of year-end best-of lists featuring Nonesuch albums and artists, still more critical praise has come in placing this music among the year's best.
Monday, December 8, 2008

NY Times: Kronos Brings "Vivid, Powerfully Realized Staging" of Crumb's "Black Angels" to Carnegie Hall

Kronos Quartet's performance in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on Friday night featured a number of first performances: three New York premieres, including that of Glenn Kotche's Anomaly, and three world premieres. Also on the program was the piece that first launched the group in 1973: George Crumb's Black Angels. The New York Times says, for Kronos, it was "a springboard for an extraordinary career of boundary-breaking discovery and innovation." Friday night's "vivid, powerfully realized staging" added still more to the power of the piece, at one point eliciting "a collective gasp" from the audience.

Read More News About Kronos Quartet

About this Album

The two pieces included on Kronos Quartet Plays Sigur Rós have both been staples of Kronos’ live concerts for several years: an arrangement of Icelandic experimental rock group Sigur Rós’s “Flugufrelsarinn” (“The Fly Freer”) and an arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“I first heard Sigur Rós in 2000 and it was thrilling,” said David Harrington, Kronos founder and artistic director. “I could not stop listening to them. Kronos had to play their music. Sigur Rós create entire universes with their sound: imaginary places populated by desires and colors and feelings that belong solely to the fleetingly understood realm of music.”

Kronos commissioned an arrangement of Sigur Rós' composition “Flugufrelsarinn” (Icelandic for “The Fly Freer”), from the Ágætis Byrjun album in 2002. In its original, sung version, “Flugufrelsarinn” relates a parable of salvation and sacrifice, in which an unnamed narrator tries to rescue helpless flies in a lake from the jaws of the approaching salmon. In Stephen Prutsman’s arrangement for Kronos, the work takes on a new delicacy while losing none of its essential mystery.

The Quartet has been playing its Prutsman/Kronos version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s famous Woodstock interpretation—in concert since 2003. The Los Angeles Times called a recent performance of the piece, “a fiery political protest that recalled [Kronos’] roots exploring classic rock.” Although it has always been an audience favorite, the group had never released a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before this digital-only release.