Passport

Those of us who remember when portable music meant a shoulder-mounted boom box might also recall a time when the Kronos Quartet were the only string quartet to play music from territories west of Los Angeles, east of the Volga or south of the Mediterranean. The machines have shrunk, but string quartets have expanded their territory. Today's young ensembles don't even need to plunge into global internationalism; they've grown out of it. The string quartet Brooklyn Rider came together for Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, so its interests lie well beyond the borough. Its first recording was Silent City, a bewitching collaboration with the Persian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor. Passport, the group's almost contemporaneous second disc, is just as itinerant and equally seductive. It makes a fairly random assortment of cultural stops, from Yerevan to Mexico City to Forest Hills, Queens, all linked by a distinctive Brooklyn swing.

The album opens with a suite of Armenian folk songs transcribed for string quartet by the priestly ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet and performed with muscular conviction and fragile wistfulness. It feels like a small hop to "La Muerte Chiquita," a ballad by the Mexican pop band Café Tacuba, which the composer … read more »