Forgive Us For  

Forgive Us For reaffirms the urgency of Kronos Quartet’s search for music that speaks unflinchingly to the human condition in all its light and darkness, hope and despair, truth and illusion. This search has led Kronos far from the string quartet’s roots in Mitteleuropa to places like Iceland, Palestine, and Ukraine—the homelands, respectively, of Hildur Guðnadóttir (b. 1982), Rim Banna (1966–2018), and Mariana Sadovska (b. 1972).

Unlike composers glossed as “nationalists” who typically draw on local folk music, history, myth, and legend to project uplifting sonic imagery of a nation’s heritage and collective identity, Guðnadóttir, Banna, and Sadovska offer a cri de cæur that calls us to bear witness to voices that have been marginalized, ignored, or silenced. These voices are not generically “national” and timeless; rather, they are tethered to specific times, places, people, and events—in Banna’s “Ya Taali’een el-Jabal” [Oh, You Who Are Climbing Up the Mountain], to Palestinian women singing coded messages outside a mountaintop prison where their husbands were incarcerated during the British Mandate for Palestine; in Guðnadóttir’s “Fólk fær andlit” [People get faces], to Iceland’s refusal of asylum to and late-night deportation of Albanian families with critically ill children in December of 2015, an act that provoked national outrage; and in Sadovska’s “Chernobyl. The Harvest,” to the erstwhile inhabitants of the now uninhabitable cities and villages abandoned after the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster. Though the three pieces are each bound to a place-specific trauma, their emotional force transcends borders, inviting listeners into a shared space of compassion. For Kronos, performing works that call attention to endangered peoples and cultures offers a way to advocate for them and amplify their voices. “The aim,” Banna said of “Ya Taali’een el-Jabal,” “is to bring people elsewhere closer to the music and soul of the Palestinians.”

David Harrington, Kronos’s intrepidly curious founder and first violinist, has said that his instrument is not so much the violin as the string quartet itself. When he hears music that stirs him, whatever its genre or instrumentation, his response is instinctive: “Kronos must play that!” Or, if not that specific piece, then a different piece by the same composer. Transforming spontaneous enthusiasm into music playable by Kronos Quartet can lead to commissioning new works or arranging preexisting ones, and both paths are represented on this album.

Guðnadóttir’s “Fólk fær andlit” was originally composed for cello (played by Guðnadóttir) and a polyphony of voices that repeatedly intone the Icelandic words miskun [mercy] and fyrirgefið okkur fyrir [forgive us for]. Kronos’s instrumental arrangement renders the haunting vocal lines with ethereal solemnity that bestows a sacred presence. “Ya Taali’een el-Jabal” overlays a recording of the late Banna’s voice on an arrangement of her song by American composer Jonathan Berger, who first heard the song on television and imagined Kronos performing it. Berger contacted Harrington, who got in touch with Banna’s longtime recording producer, Erik Hillestad (who had also produced Kronos’s 2019 album Placeless). Hillestad introduced Kronos to members of Banna’s family, who gave permission for Berger’s arrangement to proceed. “Chernobyl. The Harvest” was commissioned from Sadovska after WNYC radio producer Elena Park gave Harrington a CD of her music. Harrington was smitten and tracked Sadovska down. Kronos premiered “Chernobyl. The Harvest” in Kyiv in 2012, but recorded it only in 2024. “I just thought this music has to be heard,” Harrington recalled. “The state of the world demands it.”

The recording is the last to include the group’s longtime violinist, John Sherba, and violist, Hank Dutt (in Chernobyl) while Kronos’s newest members, violinist Gabriela Díaz and violist Ayane Kozasa, make their Kronos recording debuts in “Fólk fær andlit” and “Ya Taali’een el-Jabal.” Cellist Paul Wiancko, who joined the quartet full-time in 2023, has performed on multiple Kronos albums, including several forthcoming releases.

Sadovska envisioned “Chernobyl. The Harvest” as a “pagan requiem,” drawing on her own extensive musical fieldwork in the Polissia region of northern Ukraine, where a matriarchal stream of pre-Christian calendar rituals and songs still nourishes contemporary folklore. The piece begins with Sadovska’s plangent singing of a widow’s song from Central Ukraine over a droning harmonium, foreshadowing the alternately macabre and elegiac tone of the first three movements. Sadovska noted that some of the songs she used were originally sung in villages in the Chernobyl exclusion zone that no longer exist, having been demolished to prevent resettlement. The lament for a lost home that begins the third movement is one such song. “The harvest songs I integrated in the piece were used by the farmer women to push the coming rain clouds away while they were working in the fields,” said Sadovska. “Rain can destroy the harvest. After the Chernobyl catastrophe, we were all afraid of the clouds delivering radioactivity.” The fourth movement, titled “Paradise” [rai], features a New Year’s blessing ritual. “With this song, you celebrate the new beginning of life, and you invite the ancestors to sit at your table,” Sadovska explained. “It’s very energetic, very dynamic. This is what I felt very much during my recent travel to Ukraine [in September 2025],” she added. “This incredible life energy—stubborn, brave, and passionate—is what gives us the strength to move on.”