Michael Gordon: Clouded Yellow

The meeting of legendary Kronos Quartet and ground-breaking composer Michael Gordon has the feel of inevitability about it, but while both have been powerhouses in contemporary music from the 1980s onwards, it wasn’t until 2000 that Gordon wrote his first piece for string quartet, Potassium. Mutual respect and admiration has resulted in a productive collaboration, and this CD brings us the results. Clouded Yellow uses a certain amount of electronic manipulation of the quartet sound, from the bird-like falling sounds in the opening and some textural effects later on, but the strings are distinctive enough. The ‘flying’ feel in the music relates to a title that refers to a species of butterfly that migrates to England. Potassium takes some of its ‘blown-out’ sound from an earlier work, Industry for cello and electronics. The strings are sent though distortion filters in the opening, their downward and upward glissandi a heightened sequence of cadences that hold both angst and a cou