United States Various: Attacca Quartet (Amy Schroeder, Domenic Salerni [violins], Nathan Schram [viola], Andrew Yee [cello]). Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory, New York, 18.12.2025. (ES-S)
Haydn – String Quartet in F major, Op.50 No.5, ‘The Dream’
David Lang – daisy
Arr. Attacca Quartet – Nocturne, originally written by a composer such as Chopin
Bartók – String Quartet No.4, Sz.91
For a series of concerts in the intimate Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory, the New York-based Attacca Quartet assembled a thoughtfully conceived program that juxtaposed classical and contemporary works with a collage of their own making. As first violinist Amy Schroeder noted in remarks before the second half, Attacca’s program grew out of the quartet’s eagerness to learn Bartók’s String Quartet No.4, the central movement of which belongs to his nocturnal world.
That reading proved the high point of the evening. Rather than foregrounding brute display, Attacca treated the score as a palimpsest, allowing its folkloric reminiscences and classically inspired structure to surface beneath layers of modernist compression and instrumental bite. Rhythmic snap and physical gesture were present but shaped with inflection and color, acquiring a supple, almost vocal quality.
An almost continuous interpenetration of instrumental voices characterized the performance, the lines constantly overlapping and passing through one another without any single part being artificially projected to the foreground. Even Bartók’s more unconventional sound effects, including sul ponticello and col legno writing, were integrated into the broader musical fabric.
That manner of shaping the music proved especially persuasive in the central slow movement, where nocturnal textures unfolded with restraint and inward focus. Muted sonorities, glissandos and fragmentary motifs accumulated without forcing effect, the music’s unease and eeriness emerging through balance and inward listening, not overt theatricality. In the surrounding fast movements, Attacca retained edge and precision while resisting the temptation toward brute display. Snap pizzicatos and sudden accents were absorbed into a broader expressive arc, clarifying the work’s symmetry and the return of earlier material in the finale.
Earlier in the evening, David Lang’s daisy offered a very different kind of intensity, grounded in accumulation and moral unease rather than folkloric memory. Co-commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory and heard in New York for the first time this week, the two-movement work takes its point of departure from Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 ‘Daisy’ campaign advertisement, in which childhood innocence is abruptly eclipsed by the threat of nuclear annihilation.
In the opening movement, first daisy, Lang’s concept of innocence being ‘taken for granted’ guided the unfolding of the musical material. Attacca resisted the urge to dramatize the process, allowing the music’s gradual accumulation to speak for itself.
What begins as a gently articulated line is split into overlapping strands, with a sense of continuity never entirely lost even as density increases. At certain points, the four instrumentalists appeared slightly out of phase, a deliberate effect that contributed to the music’s underlying instability. Tension accrued through insistence, and the players emphasized persistence over escalation, articulating the process through increasingly compressed rhythmic groupings without recourse to overt dynamic stress.
The second movement turned inward. Sustained tones replaced nervous motion, the lines expanding and breathing rather than splintering under pressure. The music seemed to test whether openness could be preserved, not overwhelmed. Attacca controlled the long, fading close with extreme precision, the final pianissimo hovering at the threshold of audibility. The ending avoided any sense of resolution, leaving endurance as a suspended possibility.
As a testament to the quartet’s continuing anchoring in tradition, the evening opened with Haydn’s String Quartet Op.50 No.5, ‘The Dream’, which aligned naturally with the program’s theme. The quartet allowed the work’s naïve, violin-led opening gesture to register without exaggeration, trusting its apparent simplicity to do its work. That innocence was short-lived, however, as Haydn’s contrapuntal play and motivic give-and-take quickly came into focus, articulated with clarity and rhythmic lift. With its balance and proportion, the slow movement was more about ordered repose than reverie, while the Minuet benefited from sharply placed accents and a keen sense of wit. In the finale, Haydn’s humor emerged naturally through timing and articulation without overt emphasis.
Attacca chose to preface Bartók with one of its own concoctions, a Nocturne described in the program as ‘originally written by a composer such as Chopin’, an attribution that raised more questions than it resolved. The piece interwove recognizable quotations from Chopin’s Nocturne No.11 with other material suggestive of Debussy and Poulenc, aimed at evoking different perceptions of a nightly world. Sitting uneasily between Lang and Bartók, it nonetheless showcased the ensemble’s bright sound and intensity, even if it ultimately drew attention more to surface association than to structural coherence. The nocturnal idea itself has been pursued in more sustained ways in works such as George Crumb’s Black Angels – which Lang has cited as an inspiration for daisy – or Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit, where atmosphere is allowed to accumulate without reliance on quotation or stylistic collage. The final element of the potpourri drew on the ensemble’s favorite band, Radiohead, from which Attacca, true to its name, attacked Bartók without cesura, a transition that proved less outlandish than it might initially have seemed.
As a professed homage to the Danish Quartet, Attacca played as an encore one of their arrangements of a Scandinavian tune. Interpreted with the enthusiasm that characterized the entire evening, the explicitness of its folkloric references stood in marked contrast to the more oblique ones just heard in Bartók.
Edward Sava-Segal