Kronos Quartet at the Auckland Town Hall

The mixing-desk in the stalls was a warning that we were not in for an evening of traditional chamber music fare from the Kronos Quartet.

Michael Gordon's Potassium was the launchpad, unfurling a suitably volatile soundscape. Ghostly glissandi zoomed past like cars on a highway, climaxing in a big moment that, with different scoring, could be a grand Sibelius theme. A chattering middle section counterpointed with the phantom cars and at times the sound itself seemed to be travelling around the stage.

The surprises continued. A transcription of Charles Mingus' Myself when I am real set off like MoR cross-over, until those signature shafts of unexpected colour cut through.

Leader David Harrington told me 17 years ago that Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday were major influences on his violin-playing style. Tonight all four Kronos players sang the blues with eloquent authority.

Leaving America for the wider world, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's Oasis started by exploring the mesh of water sounds and pizzicato until the players created intricate dialogues by winding the merest wisps of phrases around each other.

While Ali-Zadeh's Azerbaijan soundscapes intrigued, four arrangements from the film music of Rahul Dev Burman were slighter. Kronos' 15 minutes in Bollywood seemed more like encore material, to be savoured one at a time. Taped tabla underlay became a little intrusive although the fourth, In Donald's Eyes, surging up around Hank Dutt's unbridled viola, was more explorative.

Returning to America after the interval, Alexandra du Bois' Oculus pro Oculo Totum Orbem Terrae Caecat lamented the Iraq war with fragile whalesong moans usurped by powerful harmonies, offering an extraordinary interface between traditional and avant-garde, all the more so coming from a 20-year-old.

The interaction between the Kronos players and their taped selves remains a mystery on the recording of Steve Reich's Triple Quartet. Live, all was revealed. The medievalism of the second movement seemed more tranquil than ever, and in the third, the interplay between visual bow-strokes and heard rhythms was endlessly intriguing.

Encores were generous. Flugufrelsarinn by the Icelandic group Sigur Ross, sounded like Bjork without the vocals, but the quartet's lusty take on Jimi Hendrix' The Star-Spangled Banner, introduced with the inevitable Bush jibe, might well have been coming from the middle of a Baghdad bombing attack, with a flurry of lighting effects that were more Saigon disco circa 1968. A visual and musical overload to savour.