This year the founder and leader of the Kronos Quartet, American David Harrington, was the guest curator of Adelaide Festival’s annual weekend mini-festival Chamber Landscapes at UKARIA Cultural Centre in the Adelaide Hills. He gave it the title of Horizons and invited a selection of global musicians who’ve worked with Kronos over the years to take up residency for a week at UKARIA alongside two Australian string quartets and then share some of the fruits of their collaborations.
I went last Saturday (8 March) and saw three concerts, introduced by Harrington who simply stated that these were some of the greatest musicians in the world and that he had seized the opportunity to bring them together and hear them play live.
The first concert Bridges featured Vietnamese composer, singer and virtuoso đàn tranh and đàn bầu player Van-Ahn Vho; Javanese composer, singer and gamelan player Peni Candra Rini; Australian composer, violone player and electronic sound artist Chloë Sobek; the three musicians from Mali who comprise Trio Da Kali (singer Hawa Diabaté, balafon player Lassana Diabaté, and Mamadou Kouyaté on bass ngoni); and the Australia/Europe-based Affinity Quartet.
The program included Van-Ahn Vho’s delicate arrangement of Satie’s Gnoissienne No. 3 for đàn bầu and violone; a series of thrilling vocal and instrumental improvisations by various combinations of singers and musicians, including a delicious duet between Peni Cendra Rini on vocals and Mamadou Kouyaté on ngoni about seeing kangaroos in the Adelaide Hills; and a wordless and meltingly transcendent version of Mahler’s song for voice and orchestra, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (‘I am lost to the world’), here played by Van-Ahn Vho on đàn bầu with the Affinity Quartet.
By the time the last notes died away, I too was lost for words, and not just because of the Mahler. This was a concert that gave me hope for the world, and the idea of a shared humanity.
The second concert Continents saw the Affinity Quartet return to the stage for a polished and energetic rendition of Sculthorpe’s lyrical String Quartet No. 11, Jabiru Dreaming. They were followed by the Australian String Quartet giving a spectacular performance of Irish composer, viola and viol d’amore player Garth Knox’s Satellites, a work that demonstrates just about every imaginable sound that can be made on a string instrument. Finally the Affinity Quartet were joined by Lassana Diabaté for a fascinating arrangement of selections from Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string quartet, interspersed (and occasionally accompanied) by Diabaté’s inspired improvisatory responses on the balafon.
The final concert of the day focussed on the Trio Da Kali, an elite ensemble belonging to the West African hereditary tradition of singers, musicians, storytellers and oral historians known as griots. The first half of the concert saw the trio take the stage to themselves for a series of songs led by their musical director Lassana Diabaté on balafon, underpinned by the driving pulse of Mamadou Kouyaté on bass ngoni, and spearheaded by the magnificent voice and regal presence of Hawa Diabaté. In the second half they were joined by the Australian String Quartet for a series of songs from their 2007 collaborative album with Kronos, Ladikilan. Here at last we saw Western musicians in a supporting role, rather than the reverse as is so often the case; and it was an added joy to watch the latter’s playing – and crucially their body-language – transform in the course of the set under the influence of their colleagues.
Dialogues in Sound (Tuesday 11 March) was a follow-up concert a few nights later at the Adelaide Town Hall featuring the same combination of global musicians from the Chamber Landscapes program – Van-Anh Vo, Peni Candra Rini and Trio De Kali ¬ supported once again by the Australian String Quartet (ASQ). If anything the impact was even more rousing in a much larger concert hall, and made even more of a statement in the magnificent marble-and-gold-leaf Victorian interior of the Town Hall.
Read: Music review: Daylight Express, Elder Hall, Adelaide Festival 2025
They reprised many of the highlights from the previous weekend, including a thrilling call-and-response improvisation between Van-Ahn Vho on đàn tranh and Lassana Diabaté on balafon, and a major work I’d missed on the Saturday: Peni Candra Rini’s composition Maduswara. This was a highly expressive and complex work for voice and string quartet, mostly written in the pentatonic scale typical of gamelan music, with the addition of cymbals that were struck by members of the quartet, and a background track that sounded like a field recording on a tropical night, including the sound of frogs and a gathering storm.
Peni is a phenomenal performer, and her heightened vocal, physical and facial expressiveness were matched by the sensitive and evocative playing of the ASQ. This for me was the single most exciting work of the concert, if not the entire Chamber Landscapes program.
Chamber Landscapes 2025: Horizons
★★★★★
Curated by David Harrington
Bridges: Van-Ahn Vho, Peni Candra Rini, Chloë Sobek, Trio Da Kali, Affinity Quartet
Continents: Australian String Quartet, Affinity Quartet, Lassana Diabaté
Trio Da Kali: Trio Da Kali, Australian String Quartet
As part of Adelaide Festival 2025
UKARIA Cultural Centre, Mount Barker Summit
Saturday 8 March 2025
Dialogues in Sound
★★★★★
Trio Da Kali, Van-Ahn Vho, Peni Candra Rini, Australian String Quartet
As part of Adelaide Festival 2025
Adelaide Town Hall
Tickets: $30 – $89
Tuesday 11 March 2025
An extended version of this review can be found on Substack.
