Black Angels

Album review

Black Angels is a powerful and thought-provoking set focused on friction and struggle.  Rarely has the soul-ravaging horrors of war been portrayed as viscerally as in István Márta's "Doom. A Sigh," where the music serves as the backdrop for field recordings of Romanian women weeping in obvious pain and singing death songs.  It remains one of the most haunting pieces of classical music ever written.  This brilliantly programmed collection begins with the album's namesake, George Crumb's three movement meditation on the Vietnam war.  Written in 1970, and described by its composer as "a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world," "Black Angels I. Departure" opens with keening, flittering, insectine string textures before venturing into a world of whispers, knocks, whistles, gongs, shakers, and varying vocal chants. Thomas Tallis's 40-part early English motet Spem in Alium, transcribed here for quartet, generates a surprisingly opulent Renaissance ambience. A recording of American composer Charles Ives singing a spirited, if very amateurish, version of his original march "They Are There! Fighting for the People's New Free World" is a delightful palate cleanser.  The intense and, at times, quiet and exquisitely sad recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110 is also menacingly declarative in passages, mirroring the composer's turbulent feelings about his relationship with the Russian government. Serving as both a protest and a provocation, Black Angels is one of Kronos Quartet's most essential artistic statements. © Robert Baird/Qobuz