Balanescu Quartet

Balanescu Quartet and Kraftwerk, violins on one side, computers on the other. On a superficial analysis, nothing could seem musically more distant, and yet the best-known album – "Possessed" – by the ensemble led by the Romanian violinist is actually based on covers of the Dusseldorf quartet, with the sole exception of an inspired version of David Byrne's "Hangin' Upside Down" and a couple of original pieces.

Two worlds that seem light years apart, yet united by a relentless quest for modernity.

When Kraftwerk, more than forty years ago now, literally invented electronic music, their goal wasn't to do something musically revolutionary, but rather to achieve something technically revolutionary within the realm of pop music. They wanted to bring into music improperly labelled as "light" the first vocoders (self-built, no less), the clatter of trains, car horns and the cold voices of robots, true to the etymology of the concept of pop(ular) music — that is, music intended for a vast number of people, for whom those sounds are the everyday soundtrack of their lives.

On the other hand, a figure with a classical background and training like Alexander Balanescu, if he wanted to modernise the use of traditional instruments, could only engage with the work of the most innovative group in pop music, granting the delightful melodic textures of tracks like "Model" or "Autobahn" the status of third-millennium standards, in a genuine act of elevating popular culture (the very opposite, mind you, of the vulgar trivialisation and debasement of classical music carried out by certain long-haired pianists back home in Italy).

To celebrate "Possessed", the Balanescu Quartet took the stage at Hiroshima Mon Amour in Turin. With no set design, four music stands for the scores (it is, after all, a string quartet), dim lighting and minimal use of smoke, the setting proved evocative.

The concert opened with the gorgeous "No Time Before Time", followed by a few pieces from "Maria T." and "Luminitza", albums tied to the Romanian tradition rediscovered by the violinist in the early '90s after more than two decades spent abroad.

During "Still With Me", taken from "Luminitza", Alexander Balanescu temporarily set aside his violin to declaim in a stentorian voice a series of key dates in the history of his country and of Europe (Ceaucescu's rise to power, the fall of the Berlin Wall, right up to the entry into the European Union of countries once belonging to the communist bloc).

The voice doesn't steal the scene from the strings, which are played now with delicacy, now with force, but also tapped or almost slapped, plucked with an intensity more tied to a rock sensibility than to that of the prim and proper violinists of the concert hall.

The violinist's declamation further underscores the popular vocation and modernity of his compositions, in an interweaving of traditional instruments (thinking of strings as instruments tied to Eastern European folklore), an attitude that belongs both to European art music and to compositional avant-garde.

The second half of the evening, in which the reinterpretations of Kraftwerk's compositions are concentrated (including "Pocket Calculator", "Autobahn", "Model", "Computer Love"), thus turns out to be part of a philological and cultural journey that unfolds over the course of the concert, one that also answers those in the audience who, at the start, were wondering "when are the Kraftwerk songs coming?"

Credit and honour to Alexander Balanescu, capable of translating the history of a people into music and drawing the audience into a journey – a true "Trans-Europe Express", to stay on the subject of Kraftwerk – that leads from village festivals in the East to the presence of robots and Western lights, joining together fragments of music and tradition with a clarity, a delicacy and a sharp eye for spotting the similar within the different that make him one of the absolute masters of contemporary popular music.

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