Music From The Cradles Of Civilisation

I have an ambivalent attitude to the Kronos Quartet. On paper, they should be an ensemble that I would embrace wholeheartedly. Adventurous repertoire, forever searching for new fields to plough, open minded and far reaching in their outlook. But I can't help being a little put off by a hint of desperation in their attempts to be trendier than thou, with every ethnic culture ripe for plunder, any culture acceptable apart from one's own. That said, I have taken the plunge again with this disk, Floodplain. The conceit here is to take music from cultures associated with the floodplains of great rivers and to try to establish some link. The links are tenuous in many circumstances from the Danube, to the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges, Volga and so on. But even if the concept doesn't completely hang together, there is fine music throughout. Guest artist appearances are limited, from the somewhat spurious noodlings of Ramallah Underground to the much more potent vocals of Azerbaijani father and daughter duo Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova. The pieces rooted in traditional folk musics or the classical traditions of Persia and India work far better than those incorporating Arab pop. Showing the same strenghs and weaknesses as Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road project and the work of Osvaldo Golijov, in the final analysis the disk still holds together as a work full of soul and humanity.