Attacca Quartet Begins its Own SFP Series

Attacca Quartet members (clockwise from upper left) Amy Schroeder, Nathan Schram, Andrew Yee, and  Domenic Salerni (photograph by David Goddard, courtesy of SFP)

Some readers may recall that, this past June, San Francisco Performances announced that this current season would have a new three-concert series devoted entirely to performances by the Attacca Quartet. The series was given the title Contemporary Chamber, with the “mission” that each of the three programs would include at least one contemporary offering. That series began last night, and the contemporary composer was David Lang, represented by his two-movement “daisy.” That was complemented, after the intermission, by a series of nocturnes that began with Frédéric Chopin and concluded with Radiohead. Sadly, the program provided no specifics for that journey.

That may have been just as well. While the arrangement of Chopin was engagingly effective, none of the following nocturnal selections came even close to the Polish composer’s demanding standards. The listening experience reminded me of Winston Churchill’s famous definition of history: “One damned thing after another!” When coupled with Lang’s contribution, the entire core of the program came across as disappointing.

The good news is that the rest of the program was framed by two composers, both of whom had a prodigious command of the talent for creating music for string quartet. Joseph Haydn has been called the “Father of the String Quartet;” and his command of that genre yielded 83 compositions (the last being incomplete), all accounted for in Volume III of the Hoboken catalog. Last night’s selection was Hoboken III:48, the fifth in the collection of the six Prussian Quartets (Opus 50). This began the program, which concluded with the fourth of Béla Bartók’s six string quartets. Bartók may not have been as prodigious as Haydn, but he definitely had his own prodigious techniques of invention!

Both of these compositions were given solid and thoroughly engaging accounts by the four Attacca performers: violinists Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni, Nathan Schram on viola, and cellist Andrew Yee. My only quibble was the too-smooth transition from Radiohead to Bartók. This undermined the intensity of Bartók’s opening gesture, but my guess is that there were enough members of the audience that were already familiar with that gesture! For my part, expectation was already beginning to mount while Attacca galumphed its way through that muddled sequence of nocturnes!

Nevertheless, Attacca’s approaches to both Haydn and Bartók were so well informed in technique and so expressive in execution that any shortcomings in the overall program could be easily overlooked!