MUSIC REVIEWS : KRONOS QUARTET AT UCLA

The Kronos Quartet boasts endless resources and projects of great imagination to such an extent that Friday’s agenda, opening the group’s third season at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, lasted 2 1/2 hours.

The San Franciscans continue to excel as virtuosos of the new muse, to attract and commission international composers to write stimulating works on the scale of the great masters, and to assert an image of avant-garde chic. These guidelines have gone a long way for violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.

The audience of familiar enthusiasts certainly proved the formula’s value. By now the players--sporting a kind of Russian-punk-jungle attire in deeply-bled earth colors--even seem like de facto residents of the Westside campus.

While Terry Riley’s “Salome Dances for Peace,” (Part II) takes up a full hour, it is not a minute too long. There’s nothing whatever simplistic in this early minimalist’s latest work. It begins with Eastern motifs and develops a momentous lyricism, almost Brahmsian at times in its depth and grandeur. Throughout, a sense of constant motion and surging energy prevails, in inexorable pursuit of the next musical idea.

But “Salome,” whose program note by the American composer suggests a flower-child idealism, revolves around form and tension. Individual voices shine through with an expressive vividness and at least one section logically becomes a raga.

Here, and everywhere, the Kronos played with typically fervent concentration and brilliance--issuing the most synchronized subtlety as well as the grandest flourish.

Before intermission the ensemble toured other parts of the musical world. First came Korean-born Jin Hi Kim, whose “Linking” explored the Asian wonders of gestural formality in austerely dramatic terms. Then to the Soviet Union and Alfred Schnittke’s First Quartet, a work of surpassing craft characterized by a brutal angst and contrasting fine-toned outcries. And finally to the South African roots of Kevin Volans, whose immensely appealing “White Man Sleeps” traces a minimalist landscape of rhythmic and thematic motifs.