Barbican Hall, London
Initially performed in San Francisco on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Kronos Quartet's Awakening concert was recreated in New York last year for the 10th anniversary. In many respects a typical Kronos enterprise, with the musical elements structured as a continuum and presented on a darkened stage amid a tangle of industrial detritus, this was its first UK performance.
Given the context, the fact that the concert's first sound comes from the oud, an Arabic instrument, might have proved rather a surprising awakening. Accompanied by a drone, the taped instruments were eventually joined by the cellist's lonely call for the title work, by the Uzbek composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky. It was a stirring beginning to a programme that swelled into a kind of triptych, moving from east to west. Only a portion of the music was specifically composed for the anniversary, and some of the most affecting pieces – such as Jacob Garchik's arrangement of an Iranian lullaby and Aulis Sallinen's Winter Was Hard (sung here by the New London Children's Choir) – were derived from music much older than the current century and its sorry beginning.
Extracts from Michael Gordon's The Sad Park, featuring electro-acoustic riffs on children's responses to the attacks, formed the centrepiece, while the spiritual centre was really provided by the shift from Kronos' arrangement of Einstürzende Neubauten's 1980s classic Armenia – in which distorted, amplified strings scream angrily to the accompaniment of metal being pounded and torn by an angle-grinder – to Terry Riley's hypnotic One Earth, One People, One Love. Despite unavoidable flecks of hippy kitsch, the whole concert did succeed in radiating this mantra, somehow tapping into the slow, ancient rhythm of our common civilisation, swallowing up its recent grief. It may seem a small gesture – given the rampaging political idiocies of the last decade – but every little helps.