The Grammy Award winning Attacca Quartet is one of the most adventurous chamber music ensembles around. Equally at home playing the standard quartet literature such as Haydn, Beethoven and Ravel, they also have established themselves as being fore-runners of exploring new music and interpreting music not originally written for string quartet.
On November 5th, 2021 the Attacca’s released their latest offering “Of All Joys.” The disc is a direct product of the COVID lockdowns. “It’s a reaction to not being able to be together as much… and the indescribable joy of when we do finally get to play together,” states Dominic Salerni violinist with the Attacca quartet.
The CD juxtaposes the music of more contemporary composers such as Phillip Glass and Arvo Part, with composers from the 16th and early 17th century such as Gregorio Allegri, Orlando Gibbons, Luca Marenzio, and others. “We were intrigued by the notion that if you were to just close your eyes and not look at the name of track, that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell what century it was written in,” states Dominic Salerni, violinist for the Attacca Quartet.
There are several common threads with the music from the minimalist composers such as Part and Glass with those of late Renaissance early Baroque composers. As Salerni says, “The disc explores commonalities across time… rhythm, harmony, melody…in the minimalist vein you do have this return to this simplistic or recursive structures… so I think we were trying to tease out some of the similarities there.”
This goal of musical time traveling works! The first track on the CD is Arvo Part’s piece “Summa” which was originally written for choir, but played by the quartet, if you did not know any better; you would think the music was written by someone from the late renaissance.
The centerpiece of the CD “Of All Joys” is Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 “Mishima.” This is also the only work on the recording that was originally written for string quartet. Taken from the 1985 film score that Philip Glass wrote for Paul Schrader’s film “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” the six movement string quartet acts like a suite for string quartet, very much like a ballet or opera suite. The music can be heard without seeing the movie, while at the same time summoning very different emotions from one movement to the next for the listener.
All of the other music on “Of All Joys” was arranged by the quartet itself, with some overdubbing that was done in studio. The Attacca Quartet do an amazing job of replicating the sound of the original source material, whether it be choir, solo voice or in the case of the Orlando Gibbons Fantasia A6 in D minor, six viola de gambas.
Ultimately, “Of All Joys” is a celebration of creating beautiful, sonorous harmonies and sounds that can only be made with the four outstanding players of the Attacca Quartet. The ability to come together, and revel in something as simple as a perfectly tuned interval, after the extended lockdown created by the pandemic, takes on a whole meaning after the imposed COVID lockdown break.
The benefit to the listener is that the project “Of All Joys” is a calming, musical oasis in these busy, hectic, and sometimes uncertain times. A disc that must be heard!
To See Chris Wolf’s conversation with Domenic Salerni from the Attacca quartet click here: