Steve Smith on the Kronos Quartet

"Credit for inventing the string quartet tends to be laid at the feet of Joseph Haydn. … Haydn was not the first composer to write pieces for two violins, viola and cello. But his efforts established … intimacy, flexibility and expressiveness. … Credit for intuiting that the medium could be opened wider — in a sense reinventing the string quartet as a vehicle of limitless stylistic breadth — belongs to the violinist David Harrington, who founded the Kronos Quartet in 1973. Today the quartet — currently Mr. Harrington, the violinist John Sherba, the violist Hank Dutt and the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler — spends some five months a year on the road, playing in concert halls, nightclubs and at festivals. It has sold more than 2.5 million recordings from a discography of nearly 50 albums, most of them on the Nonesuch label. The latest Kronos disc, 'Rainbow,' a collaboration with the Afghan rubab player Homayun Sakhi and the Azerbaijian singers Alim and Fargana Qasimov, comes out in March on the Smithsonian Folkways label as part of a superb Central Asian series sponsored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture" ("The String Quartet, Reinvented," New York Times, 2/28/10).