** 2026 Stock ** Black Angels is the moment Kronos Quartet steps fully into its own mythology: an album where George Crumb’s electric scream against the Vietnam war detonates inside a carefully sequenced ritual of centuries-spanning music. Released by Nonesuch in 1990, it remains one of the label’s most jarring and important titles, and a cornerstone of the quartet’s discography. The record opens with Crumb’s Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land), the piece that first inspired violinist David Harrington to form Kronos in 1973, and radiates outward into works by Thomas Tallis, István Márta, Charles Ives and Dmitri Shostakovich. Together they form a meditation on war, death, memory and spiritual survival that feels less like a recital and more like a single, disturbed night’s vision.
Crumb’s Black Angels is the black sun around which everything else orbits. Written in 1970 as a “sonic jeremiad” against the Vietnam war, it is a blistering, 18‑minute sequence of amplified strings, spoken numbers, distorted echoes and insectoid textures that Kronos tears into with an intensity closer to noise rock than salon modernism. Electric effects, multiple overdubs and shards of distortion warp the familiar timbre of the string quartet until it feels weaponised: bow hair becomes static, harmonics shriek like air-raid sirens, percussive attacks land like distant bombardments. Crumb’s fascination with numerology and symbolic patterning - thirteens and sevens embedded in rhythms and structures - may not be obvious on first listen, but the music’s sense of inexorable design is, a ritual architecture built from fear and fury.
The album’s second side steps back from that immediate blast without offering real comfort. A 16th‑century work by Thomas Tallis, rendered with viol-consort intimacy, opens a window onto a different kind of darkness, a quiet, ecclesiastical space where the notion of “early music” becomes another ghost in the room. Márta’s Doom. A Sigh and Ives’s They Are There! bring a more explicit sense of history and political charge: Márta’s piece is sparse yet haunted, shaped by the Hungarian composer’s own memories of oppression, while Ives’s song collides patriotic fervour with dissonant unease, a fractured optimism Kronos plays with biting clarity.
Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, occupying the next side, feels like the spiritual twin of Black Angels: composed in 1960 and dedicated “to the victims of fascism and war,” it has long been read as the composer’s veiled indictment of all totalitarian violence, including the Soviet system that hemmed him in. Kronos drives the five movements with a taut, urgent focus, leaning into the obsessive DSCH motif, the sudden dynamic lashes, the hollowed-out whispers; it may not supplant the legendary Borodin Quartet reading, but it stands as a deeply felt, fiercely argued interpretation that underlines the album’s through-line from individual scream to collective elegy. Framed this way, Shostakovich’s music is not an addendum but a counter-chorus, answering Crumb’s electric threnody with its own, more classically wrought despair.
What makes Black Angels so powerful three decades on is the way the program feels both curated and fated. Instead of new commissions - the band’s later calling card - this is a set of existing works reconfigured into a single, bracing narrative about war, power, faith and the fragility of the soul. The sequence collapses stylistic and temporal boundaries: Renaissance polyphony, American modernism, Eastern European lament and avant-garde electroacoustic theatre are treated as different facets of the same crisis. Recent vinyl reissues only accentuate the physicality of Kronos’s sound, revealing more bow resin, overtones and air around the instruments, which in turn sharpens the sense of the quartet as an embodied presence wrestling with the material. For listeners drawn to the darker edges of the string quartet repertoire - or to the idea of the quartet as a site of political and sonic extremity - Black Angels remains a touchstone: a record where the scream doesn’t simply puncture the silence, but permanently alters the atmosphere in which every subsequent note must live.
