Dawn Upshaw's first entrance could not have been less auspicious. In a real-life enactment of every singer's worst nightmare, she sang a few tentative phrases of Osvaldo Golijov's Lua Descolorida before stopping mid-flow and announcing that she had lost her voice just minutes before coming on stage, thanks to a nasty cold. But although Upshaw had to curtail her programme, her singing, which sounded almost as full-toned and expressive as her unafflicted voice, was the highlight of the evening.

Tonight Is the Night is a collaboration between the Kronos Quartet and Upshaw, designed as an aural journey around the world, presenting the music, poetry and singing styles of everywhere from Azerbaijan to the US, India to Yugoslavia.

Gabriela Ortiz's five-movement song cycle Baalkah, which sets texts in a Mayan dialect and was specially commissioned for this tour, was the most substantial and involving of the new works and arrangements.

Baalkah veered from slowly evolving, almost static textures, to violent, motor-like rhythms. Upshaw's voice was treated as another instrumental part, as the richness of the Mayan dialect inspired melismatic meditations on individual words and obsessive repetitions of others. In the final movement, which was framed by Upshaw's declamatory, wordless monologue, the Kronos players bowed suspended cymbals and left Upshaw alone on stage in a mesmerising trance.

Replacing the numbers Upshaw could not sing, the Kronos played a typically wide-ranging selection of music, from Hildegard von Bingen to John Cage. The historical and cultural diversity of the concert was laudable. But the quartet's approach treads a fine line between a genuine revelation of many kinds of music and a multicultural glibness.

Their playing, and their style of presentation, tends to flatten out the differences between musics and cultures into a blandly trendy stew of lighting effects and a succession of short, easily digestible cultural chunks.