Attacca Quartet first formed with four students at the Juilliard School in New York in the early 2000s, making their Carnegie Hall debut in 2003. The current line-up is Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni (violins), Nathan Schram (viola), and Andrew Yee (cello).

In their programs, they aim to combine iconic pillars of the repertoire with new music by living composers, and that is what we got this evening: two works by American composer Caroline Shaw, plus the well-known String Quartet in F (1903) by Maurice Ravel.

Shaw’s music is becoming increasingly familiar following her 2013 award of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Partita for Eight Voices. It was written for the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, of which Shaw was a founding member. (She is a singer, as well as a pianist, organist, violinist, and composer.)

Shaw has worked closely with Attacca Quartet; indeed, the two works we heard tonight have been recorded by the quartet (on the Nonesuch label; both releases won Grammy Awards). She is at home in many genres, including film music and pop.

Three Essays is a 20-minute work in three continuous movements. In contemporary classical music, the ‘essay’ has become established as a short but densely packed piece in which many moods are expressed and developed succinctly. Orchestral essays were famously written by the American Samuel Barber (three), and later by the English composer Stephen Dodgson (seven). The form seems to suit Shaw. She presents brief episodes of syncopated rhythm or quasi-minimalist patterns, sonority-driven effects, or richly harmonised tonal chord progressions (with a hint of ancient viol music), then arranges these episodes as a collage to create a whole musical picture. You might say each essay is the sum of its parts.

Attacca Quartet. Photo © David Goddard

The same approach is heard in Plan & Elevation, influenced by the composer’s strong interest in formal gardens. Here, there is more of a sense of musical ideas growing and blooming, as it were, from small motifs. This type of music, with its continually and often abruptly changing textures, requires an ensemble with perfect expressive and dynamic unanimity. Attacca Quartet is certainly that: their precision, timing, and rapport are remarkable.

The same was true in their performance of Ravel’s String Quartet in F, which they played with unusual flexibility and expressive range. The quartet lived up to its name in the second movement, driven by Yee’s vehement pizzicato. The lovely but not entirely untroubled third movement was dominated by the seductively burnished tone of Schram’s viola.

Then the finale received the most exciting and coherent performance I have ever heard. Often in this movement the tension abates, but not with the Attacca. They provided an uplifting conclusion to an absorbing concert.

This was quartet playing at its peak.

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