Kronos Quartet
In the summer of 2013 I had the good fortune to spend a few weeks in the United States, filming the Kronos Quartet in rehearsal in San Fransisco & on stage in New Haven, Connecticut; this was followed by my filming the British premiere of ‘Landfall’, an extended collaboration between Kronos & Laurie Anderson.
What had started as a research project with the musicologist Amanda Bayley rapidly expanded into a potential feature-length documentary. The half-hour edit here, which Kronos generally liked, is in effect a trailer, cut from almost a hundred hours of footage, which I hoped would lead to a commission from a major broadcaster.
In the event this proved unsuccessful, with even the BBC saying that Kronos (who regularly fill the Barbican to capacity) was ‘of minority interest’. Sadly the project was abandoned. My hope is that this half-hour cut, which features the pipa virtuosa Wu Man, & work by, among others, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Jimi Hendrix, Angelique Kidjo, Steve Reich, Terry Riley & Mariana Sadovska, will provide at least a snapshot of what these extraordinary musicians were doing during those weeks in 2013.