RHODIUM

The world's rarest and most precious metal is, quite delightfully, named after the Greek for 'rose'. Some (often overlooked) records I admire - from all musical genres - will comprise this series, which I'd like to introduce with, in my mind, one of the great albums.

Kronos Quartet : Black Angels (1990)

when you have a group of virtuoso musicians with such a positively combined intent as exhibited on Black Angels, the results are predictably incendiary; see, with me, the problem with classical music isn't the compositions or the style, it's the now culturally entombed structure within which it occupies and from whence new performers are produced, that conspires to betray an artistically greater super-objective

not so with Black Angels, which compiles some staggeringly morbid brooding music from a variety of composers and eras, Renaissance to contemporary - and though, at least for me, it's not something to necessarily listen through in sequence, those selected are in perfect congruence within a collection; meanwhile, the production and performances by Kronos Quartet are suitably transcendent (despite the mutterings and pedantry of a few classical traditionalists)

the opening title piece written by George Crumb simply blows away the entire careers of most so-called experimental musicians with its genuinely challenging complex layers of metaphor and meaningful allusion, full of subtlety and nuance; then this dark journey reverts to a much beloved musical period of mine, the 16th century, in the majestic form of Thomas Tallis' Spem In Alium; next up is Istvan Marta's piece Doom. A Sigh which is terrifying and disturbing and one that I have come back to for inspiration on many an occasion; after Charles Ives' They Are There!, the album ends with perhaps the better known Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich, an incredibly unsettling 20 minute musical tombstone dedicated to victims of Stalin (as described by the great Russian composer himself)