concert review: Attacca Quartet

This was something special.

Taking place in the smaller theater on the top floor of the SF building whose main venue is the Herbst, it consisted of a single 90-minute set of string quartet music by Caroline Shaw. For three pieces which were art songs in format, Shaw herself - a founding member of the vocal ensemble A Roomful of Teeth - came onstage and provided the vocals.

I first heard of Shaw in 2013 when she won the Pulitzer Prize for a vocal piece she'd written for her ensemble. I heard it and was quite taken with the bold but winning composition. I began looking forward to and seeking out her music. I've heard some of the pieces at this concert - "And So," "The Evergreen," "Valencia" - before.

But I hadn't heard the Attacca Quartet play them. They're so taken with Shaw's music they'd be happy if they could arrange to play nothing else. They took a strong and precision-oriented approach to this music, which served well its intricacies and cutting edges, but was perhaps not always the best approach for conveying the emotional winningness of the music. But it was always vividly arresting. The most striking moments came in "Blueprint," which features frequent fortissimo unified attacks after long pauses. These were always, uniformly, precisely aligned so that all four players were as one. A lot of good ensembles can't do that.

Elsewhere, though, squeaking the bow across the strings was striking the first time it happened, but after twenty repetitions I'd had enough. This was the only time I've ever gotten tired of what Shaw was writing. The precision uniformity of Attacca's approach didn't help here.

I find Shaw's music to have wholeness and healing in it despite a style emphasizing stuttering and fragmentation. If this concert didn't emphasize those first qualities, it was nevertheless an arresting and exciting performance of a lot of music by one of the finest composers currently out in the world.

I arrived in the City early enough to attend half of a free certificate recital by a student at the SF Conservatory. This was up in the recital hall near the top of the Conservatory's new high-rise, which I hadn't been in before. The glass wall behind the players provides a striking north view of the dome of City Hall. Anyway, the student was Ruisi Doris Du, playing on viola an arrangement of one of Bach's cello suites. It was a bit stiff and formal, characteristic of people less than seasoned professionals playing Bach, but as far as I could tell she was completely technically adept. B., who plays viola herself, would have enjoyed it, but she's not going all the way up to the City for a viola recital.

Unfortunately time pressure meant I couldn't stay for the second half, which featured Rachmaninoff (also an arrangement from cello) and Rebecca Clarke (not).