Kronos Quartet's performance in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on Friday night featured a number of first performances: three New York premieres, including that of Glenn Kotche's Anomaly (from which "many arresting moments emerged," says the New York Times), and three world premieres. Also on the program was the piece that first launched the group in the early 1970s: George Crumb's Black Angels.

The New York Times's Steve Smith, in his review of Friday's concert, introduces the piece and the group's relationship to it this way:

Anyone’s initial reaction to George Crumb’s Black Angels, a 1970 composition for amplified string quartet meant to echo the dark mood of the Vietnam War era, is likely to be a strong one. When the violinist David Harrington first heard the piece, in 1973, his response was to form the Kronos Quartet, a group that used Mr. Crumb’s work as a springboard for an extraordinary career of boundary-breaking discovery and innovation.

Friday night's staging added still more to the powerful effect of the piece:

A collective gasp was heard among audience members during "God-Music" [in the piece's final movement], when Mr. Harrington, John Sherba and Hank Dutt, on raised platforms, bowed crystal goblets lighted from beneath as Jeffrey Zeigler played a haunting cello soliloquy. Recorded music was seamlessly integrated in at least one point to facilitate movement during this vivid, powerfully realized staging.

For the complete concert review, visit nytimes.com.