< Sun Rings
Music by Terry Riley, sounds from space, visual design by Willie Williams, commissioned by NASA.
Multi-media, evening length
"Thought-provoking,
ear-opening and just plain beautiful….Surrounded by an
array of twinkling lights, with an ever-changing display on
the video screen, Kronos carved an expert path through Riley’s
wide-ranging score—from tango and pop to serene
chord clusters."
—Melinda
Bargreen, Seattle Times
"Stunning
visual information put together by Willie Williams, visual
designer for U2 and Bowie….the result is an
overwhelming multimedia epic of a show."
—Peter Culshaw, Daily
Telegraph (UK)
" A masterpiece. Riley’s music is many kinds of
gorgeous—the enchanting tripping of his folk-dance stuff
and a melodic manner rich, lyrical and breath-stopping I haven’t
heard before."
—Alan Rich, LA Weekly
"Dr. Donald Gurnett, a NASA physicist who has spent his
40-year career recording amazing sounds from the cosmos, contributed
the raw heart of the piece. The impact of these recordings
on Riley, one of America’s most resourceful and prolific
composers, was galvanic and inspiring…..Sun Rings emerges
as a suite of 10 hauntingly powerful “spacescapes” composed
to join together Dr. Gurnett’s sounds with the string
quartet for a distinctive weaving of live performance and recorded
space emanations."
—Barbara Rose Shuler, The Herald
(Monterey)
"Space. Not only is there something
out there, but Donald Gurnett recorded it, Terry Riley
set it to music, and the Kronos
Quartet performs it in a stage and sound show created by
Willie Williams."
—John Kenyon, The Gazette
(Iowa
City)
"There is a particular
sort of refined humanity to the sound made by a string quartet,
and Riley's setting of the Kronos Quartet inside this cathedral
of otherworldly whooshes and clangs was inspired."
—James Parker, Boston Globe
"Think of Terry Riley's Sun
Rings as a spaceship that faces ahead into the planets but
also looks back toward its starting point on Earth. …You
are awe-struck by the shrieks, roars and sibilant explosions
that Mr. Riley and his sound designer, Mark Grey, have collected
and organized from the NASA recordings, while whirling images
of Earth and Mars and the volatile close-ups of the Sun are
both frightening and fascinating."
—Bernard Holland,
The New York Times
"If any composer could make an
effective multi-media musical jamboree out of sounds taped
directly from the vastness
of outer space, it is Terry Riley. Part shaman, part guru,
part pre-minimalist, Riley's palate is repetitive, ethereal,
tonal, and spiritually driven, perfect for meditation on
the infinite."
—Daniel Felsenfeld, Musical America |