You’ve Stolen My Heart: Songs from R. D. Burman’s Bollywood, Kronos Quartet and Asha Bhosle

Without a doubt, the Kronos Quartet is the rock star of chamber music, but a rock star all too rare: one with great taste, musicianship, and range. Not only have they performed music from the more traditional string quartet repertoire such as Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, but they have also made it a point to continually perform music written by living composers such as Philip Glass, John Zorn, and Tan Dun. (They’ve even taken this proclivity a step further with their yearly Kronos: Under 30 project in which they select and commission a young composer to write a new work for the group.) But the Kronos Quartet has never attempted to restrict itself to the world of classical music or traditional performance. They have performed works by artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Ornette Coleman, and Esquival. Kronos has also developed or been involved in many multimedia events that combine performance and theater. Kronos has been a part of several fertile collaborations, including the Romanian gypsy string group Taraf de Haidouks on the quartet’s album Caravan. Their latest album You've Stolen My Heart is one of their most interesting collaborations and presents the quartet in a new light: as studio band.

Kronos couldn’t have picked better source material than the music of Rahul Dev Burman, a composer and brilliant arranger for India’s film industry (known as ‘Bollywood’). He was a film composer with a breadth not unlike Ennio Morricone of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly fame. Burman, like Morricone, absorbed and combined various genres from classical and folk traditions, jazz, and rock to create a music of his own. Also like Morricone, Burman was not afraid to use studio and recording techniques to create unique sound and instrument effects.

The quartet is lucky enough to have Asha Bhosle singing with them. At 73, there are singers less than a third of her age who don’t have the control she has of her pure and fluid voice. Bhosle originally sang many of the compositions revisioned on this album and was Burman’s wife from 1980 until his death in 1994.

In staying true to Burman’s vision, Kronos decided to do something that they had not pursued on past recordings--to become a multitrack orchestra. They do so with convincing results: the four quartet members play massive layered string passages, various percussion, Farfisa, autoharp, theremin, electric bass, and even accordion to fill out the arrangements. Zakir Hussain (tabla and Indian trap set) and Wu Man (pipa and liu qin), two past Kronos collaborators and internationally renowned virtuosi, return on this recording.

Interesting, and sometimes exquisite, performances of incredible source material make this an outstanding addition to Kronos’s oeuvre. Check out some samples of You've Stolen My Heart at the Kronos Quartet’s official website.
--Stephen McClurg