Ha toccato anche Londra il lungo programma di concerti ed eventi vari che per un anno intero intende sottolineare e festeggiare i cinquant'anni di attività del Kronos Quartet: del concerto di ieri al Barbican già circola sul web una ripresa audio integrale - con brani tra gli altri di Reich, Glass, Riley, Schnittke e Crumb - mentre un paio di estratti video sono su YT. Ne scrive Richard Williams al suo blog The Blue Moment, ricordando la sua 'prima volta' nel 1988: "The Kronos Quartet were already well into their second decade when I saw them for the first time, sharing the bill with John Zorn’s Naked City at the Royalty Theatre in London in November 1988. They closed their set with Aarvo Pärt’s “Fratres”, whose hushed, prayer-like cadences were what stuck in my head, and are still there. But they’d become famous for daring to introduce the compositions of Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and Jimi Hendrix to the format, and for making it clear that they’d be treating those works with the seriousness, rigour and spirit of inquiry that others applied to the standard Beethoven-to-Bartók string quartet repertoire. Last night at the Barbican, during a year-long tour to mark the 50th anniversary of their creation in San Francisco by the violinist David Harrington, “Purple Haze” was their encore: a shout of joy to celebrate their longevity and the continued relevance of their founding ideal. Harrington and his fellow violinist John Sherba, Hank Dutt on viola and Paul Wiancko, the latest recruit to the cello seat filled so long and so brilliantly by Joan Jeanrenaud, worked their way through a dozen pieces, divided into two sets, coming as close to a career summary as would be possible in two hours for an organisation that, in its lifetime, has commissioned more than a thousand works."