Quartet (1949)

Decent first dvd release from the Kronos Quartet
The DVD serves as something of a broad overview of the group's work. They play pieces from every style and period that they've worked in, but mostly stick to the short pieces. Each piece has an introduction by one of the quartet where they discuss what the piece means to them, the piece's background, or just general info about how they work together. This stuff is fairly informative, but of course you'll skip through it after the first viewing. Which brings us to the music. The performances are uniformly great, the ordering and such is great as you are never bored. If anything the DVD is too short and i would have liked to see something a little more long form. That being said, many of the pieces are really moving, particularly Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled with Grief, the Adams piece, and Escalay. The sound is well done and its fun to walk around the room and stand where each of the players would be playing in the sound field. You can actually walk from the cello over to the first violin, etc. The direction is a little overly self-conscious at times, but you don't care, you are buying it for the music ;-)