Kronos Quartet & Soo Yeon Lyuh

92Y
1395 Lexington Ave, Manhattan

 “[The Kronos Quartet's] adventurous, undecorous approach to programming and cross-cultural collaborations planted the seed for a new generation of innovative string quartets... as well as inspired individual artists to reimagine musical parameters”
— The New York Times

This concert is a collaboration between San Francisco's Kronos Quartet and Korean musician Soo Yeon Lyuh. Each will perform a 30-minute solo set, then come together for Lyuh's Yessori (Sound from the Past), in an arrangement for string quartet and traditional Korean instruments.

Lyuh composed Yessori last year for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, Kronos's open-access education and legacy project that is commissioning – and distributing for free – the first learning library of contemporary repertoire for string quartet. Before this collaboration takes the stage, Kronos performs arrangements of music by the Congolese electric likembé band Konono Nº1, Hindustani classical violinist N. Rajam, Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and Colombian multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, and music historian Mariano Galeano Toro.

Accompanying Soo Yeon Lyuh is geomungo (Korean traditional string instrument of the zither family) player Dawool Park, a rising star who has already won multiple national awards.

For more than 40 years, the Kronos Quartet has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually re-imagining the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential groups of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 60 recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, collaborating with many of the world's most intriguing and accomplished composers and performers, and commissioning more than 900 works and arrangements for string quartet.

Soo Yeon Lyuh is a haegeum (Korean two-string fiddle) player, composer and improviser. Rigorously trained in court and folk repertories from a young age, Lyuh is known for her masterful performances of new compositions for the haegeum. In Korea, she served as a member of the National Gugak Center’s new music troupe for over a decade. Deeply invested in exploring new musical possibilities via improvisation, Lyuh seeks to continually expand contemporary haegeum possibilities through work with new media and technology. 

Post-show Q&A with David Harrington and Soo Yeon Lyuh moderated by Hyo Han, Director of Performing Arts - Korean Cultural Center New York.