Kronos Quartet’s New Album ‘Witness’ Is a Powerful Reminder of Conflict’s Price

By Greg Cahill | From the March/April 2025 issue of Strings

The centerpiece of this powerful recording is the three-part “Bombs of Beirut” suite, which opens with the words, “I always fantasize about Lebanon before the [1980s] Civil War.” It’s a haunting string elegy that sends chills down the spine, and it’s quite timely as Lebanon recently once again became a killing field. Witness springs from the pencil of Pulitzer-nominated Armenian American composer and documentarian Mary Kouyoumdjian, a frequent collaborator of Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who contributes the liner notes (Egoyan tackled the subject of the 1915–16 genocide of an estimated one million Armenian people in his controversial 2002 film Ararat). 

The music on this double-disc is dark, sometimes sublime, often intense, and at times downright uncomfortable as Kronos explores the depths of the human condition and bears witness to the brutality of war. Of course, Kronos Quartet is no stranger to the themes of war and violence in its music. In 1990, the Grammy-winning ensemble recorded George Crumb’s dark Vietnam War elegy Black Angels, and more recently released the musical-theater piece My Lai, which recounts the heroic actions of US Army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, credited with stopping the army’s notorious massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai village. 

Witness begins with a string-quartet arrangement of the Armenian folk song “Groung,” a plaint of a man in search of his lost home, sung grippingly on a historical recording by the late Zabelle Panosian. Kouyoumdjian then explores the complex themes raised in that song in the four-part string quartet Silent Cranes, a 2015 music documentary commissioned by Kronos and then marking the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Silent Cranes juxtaposes fretful passages with nightmarish oral accounts of war atrocities. Witness is not for the fainthearted, but, importantly, it should serve as a wake-up call to those who may choose to ignore the devastating inhumanity of war.