Attacca Quartet makes Sarasota Music Festival debut with modern and classic works
The album cover for Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet’s “Evergreen” is solid black, with a striking closeup of the sorts of brilliant green mosses and tiny plants that fill the rainforest floor in Canada.
It’s a dramatic image, reflective of Shaw’s approach to music, which is often abstract and drills into intriguing emotions and even politics.
Attacca Quartet (the name refers to the musical direction to move immediately to the next section without pause) will present one of the works on “Evergreen,” “Three Essays: First Essay (Nimrod)” as part of the second Artist Showcase concert June 15 at the Sarasota Music Festival. They'll also perform Ravel's String Quartet in F Major.
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The Artist Showcase also will feature flutist Carol Wincenc, who marks a half century of her career by playing Sato Matsui’s “Goldenrod” with pianist Joy Cline Phinney. Weinberg’s Sonatina for Violin and Piano will feature violinist Grigory Kalinovsky and pianist Jonathan Spivey.
“Nimrod” refers to the biblical figure who oversaw the construction of the Tower of Babel, meant to reach Heaven but resulting instead in chaos and confusion in communication. As Shaw writes in her liner notes, she was inspired by the prose of Marilynne Robinson but also by the turmoil of the 2016 presidential election.
The music, said Attacca Quartet violinist Domenic Salerni, is full of “harmonic trap doors, musical trap doors where you never really know where it’s going to go. Things are moving very quickly, fully using the possibilities of the string quartet.”
Salerni is the newest member of the quartet. He joined Amy Schroeder, violin, Nathan Schram, viola, and Andrew Yee, cello, in February 2020, after a three-month whirlwind of tryout concerts, just in time for pandemic lockdown.
“Hey, we won a Grammy! Hey, we got a new member!” said Salerni ruefully. “Then of course the world shut down. We hunkered down in the studio.”
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Attacca Quartet is Salerni’s third professional string quartet; he’d previously been associated with the Dali Quartet for several years. He also is a composer.
“My very first love was chamber music and working with people in an intimate fashion,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Brooklyn. “You could get done with four people so much more quickly and deeply, with six or eight rather than a group of 100, whether it’s musicians or senators.”
Unlike many of the professional musicians who arrive for the Sarasota Music Festival, Salerni is not an alumnus of the festival, which brings together dozens of music conservatory students and others beginning their careers from around the country and the world, for three weeks of intensive study, workshops and performances.
“I was waitlisted in 2005,” he said. “It’s wonderful that sort of later in life, I get to go.”
He did attend the Kinhaven Music School, a two-week residential summer camp in Vermont, as a youngster.
“It was such a holistic experience,” he said. Young classical musicians are assigned challenging works, but because they were playing with groups of their friends, it was all fun.
What’s his advice for the student musicians (called fellows) at the festival?
“I think an earlier version of myself would say ‘make sure you practice,’” he said. “My focus has shifted. Music is beautiful, duh, but the music business can be quite challenging. I’d love everyone to be reminded that music can be part of your life; it doesn’t have to be the central part.
“I pinch myself every day; I feel incredibly lucky to be doing what I’m doing.”
The Attacca Quartet also will join with pianist and festival director Jeffrey Kahane for Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F Minor during the June 16 Festival Friday concert at the Sarasota Opera House, 61 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota.
Sarasota Music Festival
Artist Showcase 2, “Gold Standard.” 4:30 p.m. Thursday, June 15, Holley Hall, Beatrice Friedman Symphony Center, 709 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Tickets $30-$42. 941-953-3434; sarasotaorchestra.org
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Grammy-winning Attacca quartet makes Sarasota Music Festival debut
