The string quartet format has a long and distinguished history dating back 300 years, yet even today, composers flock to write for the specific possibilities that the line-up offers. This concert by the New York-based Attacca Quartet featured mainly pieces composed in the last 15 years or so, some of them arrangements of music originally written in a completely different idiom.
The general stylistic ambience was thoroughly of today, although Plan & Elevation by the prolific (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) Caroline Shaw incorporates fragments of Mozart and Ravel. They’re brief and affectionate quotes, inserted as if Shaw wants to get them out of her head: Ravel tiptoed in discreetly but Mozart burst in as if looking for an argument.
