Attacca Quartet’s New Sony Classical Album

I am a bit embarrassed to observe that I have not been keeping up to date with the recordings made by the Attacca Quartet. Indeed, the last time I wrote about one of their albums, the quartet consisted of violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee. At that time they were recording for Azica Records, and the release I discussed was Songlines.

courtesy of Sony Music Masterworks

My interest in the group only revived this past September, when I had the opportunity to stream some of the concerts from the Ojai Festival. By that time Domenic Salemi had replaced Tokunaga, and the quartet had been selected to perform on the opening night program at Ojai. Not long after that encounter, I received word that a new recording of the ensemble would be released by Sony Classics. That release took place at the beginning of this month, and the title of the new album is Of All Joys.

The program for this album is an intriguing one, which may best be explained by likening it to an arch structure. The “keystone” of that arch is Philip Glass’ third string quartet, which the composer entitled “Mishima.” On either side the keystone is “flanked” by three samples of sixteenth-century polyphony. Each of those groups of three is then “situated upon” a composition by Arvo Pärt. Thus, the album begin’s with Pärt’s “Summa” and concludes with “Fratres.”

I suspect that there will be some, if not many, among the advocates of historically-informed performance that will chafe at sixteenth-century music rubbing shoulders with Glass. For my part, I found Attacca’s approach to minimizing (or eliminating) vibrato sufficient when it came to establishing a distinction between past and present; and, unless I am mistaken, their approach to intonation tended to favor integer ratios for the intervals in those sixteenth-century selections. “Fratres,” of course, has a perfect-fifth drone; but that interval has a 3:2 ratio, which is so close to the perfect fifth of an equal-tempered scale that most listeners cannot tell the difference. The thematic lines of “Summa,” on the other hand, will probably register as equal-tempered; but both of the Pärt compositions seem to be executed with minimum (if any) vibrato. In other words the Glass quartet is the only selection that tends to endorse contemporary practices, and the churning tempo is such that there are few durations long enough to sustain a vibrato.

The astute reader may notice that I have written about structure, rather than activity. In many respects, the Glass selection takes pride of place in the center because its diversity of churning rhythms establishes a listening experience of dynamic qualities. Mind you, there are progressions across the other eight selections on the album. However, while the experience of listening to the Glass quartet is dominated by a sense of flow that establishes itself across the score’s six movements, those other eight selections distinguish themselves by their evocation of stasis.

Overall, the journey through this album seems to have been conceived in such a way to keep the capacity for attentive listening on its toes (so to speak).