Carnegie Hall

For nearly 50 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet has reimagined what the string quartet experience can be. One of the most celebrated and influential groups of our era, Kronos has given thousands of concerts worldwide, released more than 70 recordings, and collaborated with many of the world’s most accomplished composers and performers across many genres. Through its nonprofit organization, Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA), Kronos has commissioned more than 1,000 works and arrangements for quartet. Kronos has received more than 40 awards, including the Polar Music, Avery Fisher, and Edison Klassiek Oeuvrerprijs.

Integral to Kronos’ work is a series of long-running commissioning collaborations with hundreds of composers worldwide, including Terry Riley, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Tanya Tagaq, Philip Glass, inti figgis-vizueta, Fodé Lassana Diabaté, and Steve Reich. In its most ambitious commissioning effort to date, KPAA recently completed Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire. Through this initiative, Kronos has commissioned—and distributed online for free—50 new string quartet works written by composers from around the world.

In recordings, Kronos has collaborated with artists who include Wu Man, Zakir Hussain, Asha Bhosle, Mahsa Vahdat, and Nine Inch Nails. Kronos has performed live with the likes of Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg, Rokia Traoré, David Bowie, Rhiannon Giddens, Caetano Veloso, and The National, among many others.

The quartet tours for several months each year, appearing in celebrated venues around the world, including the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), Barbican (London), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), Shanghai Concert Hall, Suntory Hall (Tokyo), and Sydney Opera House.

Kronos’ expansive discography on Nonesuch includes three Grammy-winning albums—Terry Riley’s Sun Rings (2019), Landfall with Laurie Anderson (2018), and Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite (2003)—along with dozens of other acclaimed releases. Kronos’ most recent recording is My Lai (2022), an opera by Jonathan Berger and Harriet Scott Chessman. Kronos’ work has also featured prominently in many films, including the “live documentary” A Thousand Thoughts, written and directed by Sam Green and Joe Bini, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018.

Based in San Francisco, the nonprofit KPAA staff manages all aspects of Kronos’ work, including commissioning, concert tours and local performances, recordings, education programs, and an annual Kronos Festival in San Francisco.

Soo Yeon Lyuh is a composer, improviser, and master of the haegeum, a two-stringed Korean bowed instrument. Lyuh’s work strikes a balance between originality and tradition, borrowing and recontextualizing familiar gestures from Korean music. Her soundscape follows a logic of texture, pacing, feeling, and unexpected turns while also addressing present social issues.

As a performer, Lyuh possesses flawless technique and a full command of the haegeum’s traditional repertoire. For 12 years, she was a member of South Korea’s National Gugak Center, which traces its roots to the seventh-century Shilla Dynasty and is Korea’s foremost institution for the preservation of traditional music. Lyuh has endeavored to weave authentic styles into new musical domains, relocating in 2015 to the San Francisco Bay Area and drawing inspiration from its dynamic improvised music scene. In 2017, she was awarded a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to develop collaborations with Bay Area experimental musicians. She pushes herself not only to command a deep understanding of historical works, but also to negotiate challenging new ones.

Lyuh’s interest in improvisational music draws on Korean traditions lost to generations of performers. Although playing by ear is essential in bringing Korean folk music to life, preserving traditional performance has taken precedence over expanding the music’s improvisational vocabulary. In this respect, Lyuh has ventured in a decidedly experimental direction. She was featured on the record Mudang Rock (2018) with drummer Simon Barker, guitarist Henry Kaiser, bassist Bill Laswell, and saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. In 2017, she played with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith at the Create Festival in San Francisco. She also played on a free improvisation recording, Megasonic Chapel (2015), featuring Kaiser, percussionist William Winant, pianist Tania Chen, and cellist Danielle DeGruttola. Meanwhile, Lyuh honed her improvisational skills by working with cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, and sitting in on courses of pianist Myra Melford and avant-garde icon Roscoe Mitchell.

In 2021, Lyuh began doctoral studies in composition at Princeton University. Previously, she earned her doctorate in Korean traditional music from Seoul National University. As a lecturer, she is sought after for her ability to impart valuable insight and intercultural understanding to those unfamiliar with Korean traditional music. As a visiting scholar at Mills College (2017–2018) and UC Berkeley (2015–2016), Lyuh taught established and emerging composers in the Bay Area about haegeum composition and techniques in order to create new repertoire for the instrument. Lyuh has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (2011–2012).

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. For more than 40 years, she worked with her partner as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014, she has been performing her own solo project, A Body in Places. In 2017, she launched the multi-year Duet Project, an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-generational experiments with a diverse range of artists, both living and dead.

Eiko & Koma created their own choreography and presented their works worldwide, including many appearances at the American Dance Festival and BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Durational performance works were commissioned and presented by the Whitney Museum, Walker Art Center, and MoMA. Eiko & Koma are the first collaborative pair to share a MacArthur Fellowship (1996), and the first Asian choreographers to receive the Samuel H. Scripps / American Dance Festival Award (2004) and Dance Magazine Award (2006). They were individually honored by the Guggenheim Foundation (1984) and at the first Doris Duke Artist Awards (2012). Otake’s solo activity earned her an Art Matters grant (2015), a Special Bessie Award (2016), the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2016), and the Sam Miller Award for Performing Arts (2020).

Otake teaches college courses and uses movement as means of inquiry to further understanding of mass violence, nuclear disasters, and other environmental matters. Otake was a think-tank fellow in the College of the Environment in 2017–2018 and an artist-in-residence at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts in 2020–2021. 

Peni Candra Rini is the daughter of a master puppeteer from the East Java province of Indonesia, and one of few female contemporary composers, songwriters, poets, and vocalists who performs sinden, a female-soloist style of gamelan singing. Strongly committed to preserving and sharing the musical traditions of her country, Candra Rini has created many musical compositions for vocals, gamelan, and karawitan, and has collaborated with various artists worldwide, including Katsura Kan, Noriko Omura, Aki Bando, Kiyoko Yamamoto, Found Sound Nation, Elena Moon Park, Ali Tekbas, Mehdi Nassouli, Asma Ghanem, and Rodrigo Parejo.

In 2012, Candra Rini completed an artist residency at the California Institute of the Arts with funding from the Asian Cultural Council. During that time, she appeared as a guest artist at eight American universities and participated in master classes with vocal master Meredith Monk. In addition to this extensive work as a performer, Candra Rini is also a lecturer in the karawitan department and a doctoral candidate at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Surakarta.

A fearless musical explorer, Vân-Ánh Võ is an award-winning performer of the 16-string đàn tranh (zither) and an Emmy Award–winning composer. She creates music that blends the wonderfully unique sounds of Vietnamese instruments with other genres, and fuses deeply rooted Vietnamese musical traditions with fresh new structures and compositions.

Võ has collaborated with musicians across different genres to create new works, bringing Vietnamese traditional music to a wider audience. She has been a composer, collaborator, and guest soloist with Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma, Southwest Chamber Music, Oakland Symphony, Monterey Symphony, Golden State Symphony, Apollo Chamber Players, Flyaway Productions for aerial dance works, and Alonzo King LINES Ballet, among others. Additionally, she co-composed and arranged the Oscar-nominated and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner for Best Documentary Daughter from Danang (2002), the Emmy Award–winning film and soundtrack for Bolinao 52 (2008), and audience favorite A Village Called Versailles (2009).

After taking on an integral role in Kronos Quartet’s theatrical production All Clear in 2012, Võ premiered her first multimedia production as artistic director, composer, and performer with Odyssey at the Kennedy Center. Her productions are unique in that they often include a community component that lead up to her performances, including community workshops that are meant to further engage participants in the topic that inspired Võ. Under President Obama’s administration, Võ was the first Vietnamese artist to perform at the White House and received the Artist Laureate Award for her community contributions through the arts.

My Lai, Võ’s latest album with Kronos Quartet and vocalist Rinde Eckert, tells a powerful story about the My Lai massacre and the ethical dilemmas of an individual placed in an impossible situation in the depths of the Vietnam War.