Grammy award-winning Attacca Quartet brings Glass, Ravel, Pärt, and Shaw to WashU this weekend

In a season marking their seventy-fifth anniversary, the Washington University Department of Music continues its annual Great Artists Series this weekend with a performance by the Attacca Quartet at the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall in the 560 Music Center on April 3 at 7 p.m.

The Brooklyn-based ensemble will perform works by Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Maurice Ravel, and Caroline Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer whose collaboration on their 2020 album Orange helped secure the quartet a Grammy.

Amy Greenhalgh is the director of strings at Washington University, where she organizes student chamber music groups, three of which will participate in a masterclass with the Attacca Quartet on Sunday morning.

“It’s very beneficial for our students to have world-renowned musicians coming to play on our stage,” Greenhalgh says. “It’s amazing that we can provide masterclasses and that quartets are willing to do it. Some performers are not always natural pedagogues, so it’s nice to have those who are interested in passing down the information that they’ve learned from their teachers to the next generation. And for many of my students, this will be the first time they’ve probably heard a chamber music piece composed by a woman.”

In advance of their performance, we spoke with violinist Domenic Salerni about the quartet’s concert program and music.

The Attacca Quartet has drawn comparison to other notable ensembles like the Kronos Quartet for your expansive stylistic repertoire. I was delighted to hear your rendition of Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 3, “Mishima” (1985), which was featured on the 2021 album, Of All Joys.

We really had a great time doing it! Part of the whole album concept is trying to tie parallels between music that’s modern, or recent, and music that comes from an earlier time. It’s trying to say, “What is it that is human and universal about all of this?”

There’s something about the third String Quartet, particularly, that gets you right in the feels. We come at it with a more pared-down approach. I remember when we first listened back [to the recording], we were out in this beautiful hall in the middle of Indiana. We listened back and we went, “Oh no, this is totally wrong.” We were in a new space; we had all this beautiful reverb. It was just the four of us and our audio engineer, and it became this very intimate experience. We tweaked—at the last minute—some of our ideas, and in doing so I think it came together in a very special way. We’ve played this piece now quite a bit, and I think we’ve grown along with it. I’m glad that it touched you, because I think it touched us in a way that, hopefully, translates over.

The same could be said of the two pieces by Arvo Pärt that bookend Of All Joys—one of which, Summa (1977), is on the program for your performance in St. Louis. It’s this prayerful, contemplative quality of musicianship that Attacca seems to get so right, especially in your interpretation of Caroline Shaw’s work.

You’re picking up on something that is what makes Caroline special. Working with her, personally, informs some of our other music. We just got off playing the Big Ears Festival, where we got to sing some of her songs and do a set of her works, mostly from the album Orange, but also a new string quartet she wrote called The Evergreen. The line was out the door, with everyone wrapped around. We were in this beautiful church, St. John’s Cathedral, with incredible acoustics. And she just had a little vocal mic, to float above the string quartet. It was almost like a religious experience.

I walked in about halfway through her set with Sō Percussion, and she was about to launch into her arrangement of an ABBA tune: “Don’t go wasting your emotion…” You step into the room, and it’s just a different atmosphere. There’s something special about her that has been so inspiring for us. I just feel so fortunate to have felt that magic, too. She’s great to work with; she’s natural and down to earth. She’s always got someone specific in mind for whom she’s writing. And, of course, her singing, her violin playing, her viola playing informs everything she does. It’s been lovely. 

If you’re thinking about Entr’acte (2019), a piece we’ve now played quite a bit, it’s become one of our warhorses. It’s an apt piece; it does exactly what it sets out to do. The way it dissolves into the solo cello moment at the end is just so poignant. We love playing it, it’s a joy to do, and we’re happy to bring it to St. Louis.

I wonder how you would describe Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major (1903), which is also on Sunday’s program. I’m struck by the impressionism and intricacy of his work, the things he can do with arpeggios.

The French composers of that era largely tried to avoid the label “impressionism,” but that was the prevailing visual artistic movement. I think they were trying to approach tonality from a different direction. Debussy was inspired by Japanese music at the 1893 World’s Fair, though that can become problematic because of the notion of appropriation: “Hey, this is another culture, let’s just be Orientalist about it.” Ravel uses pentatonic scales. There’s a lot of nontraditional harmonic motions that were borrowed from other traditions. 

But it’s funny you say, rightly, that Ravel is intricate. I remember reading an article in school that he was particularly impressed or fascinated with the idea of the fakir, which I think is the Arabic word for magician, or sorcerer. You see this play out in works of his like L’enfant et les sortilèges, which is about these toys that come to life. So people were doing Toy Story before Toy Story. It’s this notion of the mechanism, the mechanical nature, the artifice of creation. And yet through that, how you can still feel something.

You also mentioned arpeggios. If Philip Glass is at all a genius, it’s because, aside from whatever he’s got himself, he’s also a great student of music history. Ravel is someone who understands that magic, when you just have these repeated figures, and how that creates an atmosphere. There are two things about the first moment of the Ravel quartet that always crack me up. The first is that it’s in four bar phrases. It’s very square, actually, when you break it down formally. And the whole first phrase is based on an F major scale. It’s the simplest thing, and yet it sounds so new. I find that to be always the challenge. If I’m writing music, which I do a little bit, it’s like, How can I not trick the listener, but do something unexpected that still captures the simplicity or the direct human experience? 

The other thing to think about, going back to that notion of intricacy, is that Ravel wrote this piece for a competition. He was trying to say something profound but also virtuosic. This is one of the great string quartets. It bridges that romantic era and perhaps something a little bit more modern. You talk to jazz cats, and they’re studying Ravel and Debussy pretty heavily. If you look at Ravel as a bridge between the old world and the new, there’s something really wonderful to be gleaned from that.

Have you been to St. Louis before? Are you excited for the masterclass with students before the concert?

I’ve never been to St. Louis, but my grandmother was born there. I remember how she would say, “Go warsh your hands” or “Warshington,” and we would rag on her for her accent. And we love working with students. I think the masterclass can be an opportunity to hopefully inspire the next generation. We’re one of the oldest young quartets now. It feels weird becoming the elder statesman: you see people coming up, and they’re just so phenomenal. It’s like, “Wow, we actually have experience, and we can actually speak to it.” We’re not the wet-behind-the-ears cats anymore.

Tickets are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, 314-935-6543, or at music.wustl.edu/events.