Nuevo

Nuevo is an ear-teasing adventure through the sights and sounds of Mexico—its street songs, public celebrations, pop culture and much more. All, of course, presented through the uniquely imaginative lens of Kronos Quartet, and much of it (including the electrifying opening track, El Sinaloense) made possible through the arranging skills of Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov. “This is the most personal album that I’ve ever been a part of,” Kronos’ founder and first violin David Harrington tells Apple Music Classical. During the Christmas of 1995, just eight months after the tragic death of their 16-year-old son Adam, Harrington took his wife and daughter on holiday to Mexico. “Kronos had been to Mexico before,” he says, “so I knew the feeling there. And for that first Christmas, I wanted my wife and daughter to be embraced by this incredibly generous and warm culture—what I felt when I’d been there myself. Every sound that is on Nuevo is something that I heard when I was in Mexico.” One of Mexico City’s extraordinary sounds involves the ringing of hundreds of bells twice a year on the main square, Zócalo: once on New Year’s Day (when Harrington and his family happened to be in town) and on 16 September to mark Mexican Independence Day. “September 16 is our son’s birthday, and that just totalled me out,” says Harrington. “There was no way we couldn’t somehow reconnect with that.” You can hear the bells ring out at the end of 12/12. Kronos recreate another of the Harringtons’ personal moments in Perfidia, featuring the unusual but ethereally beautiful leaf-playing skills of Carlos Garcia. “We were out for a walk just after Christmas,” recalls Harrington, “and I say to my family, ‘I can hear a violinist’. So we’re walking towards this ‘violinist’ and the sound gets stranger the closer we get. It turns out it’s Carlos Garcia, and he’s playing Perfidia on an ivy leaf.” In a happy coincidence, Harrington later stumbled across a recording of Garcia playing the very same piece in a nearby bookstore. “It was exactly what I had heard the day before. So I thought, ‘OK, we’re going to have to find a way of bringing this recording into our world, and I want us to do this with, like, 101 strings. When you hear our version of Perfidia, it’s with massive overdubs. It’s like we’re playing together in the greatest concert hall in the world.” Elsewhere, Nuevo offers a dose of delightful silliness in the form of Chavosuite, a medley of popular Mexican TV themes; and there’s vocal acrobatics and unrestrained energy in El Llorar (Crying) that, were it not for its title, would lay claim to being this album’s most life-affirming moment.