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Dark Mahogany Veiling Mammoth Music New York
Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory
12/16/2025 - & December 17, 18, 2025
Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in F major “The Dream,” Op. 50 No. 5
David Lang: daisy (New York City premiere)
Attacca Quartet: Nocturne, originally written by a composer such as Chopin
Béla Bartók String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91
Attacca String Quartet: Amy Schroeder, Domenic Salerni (Violins), Nathan Schram (Viola), Andrew Yee (Cello)
Attacca String Quartet (© David Goddard)
“Having music in the schools, having art in the schools, having art in your life, should not be heroic. It should be every day. Having things we’ve paid for years ago and that we depend on kept up–our schools, our political institutions–should not be a heroic act. It should be part of our daily citizenship.”
David Lang
“Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.”
Béla Bartók
The combination of the Attacca String Quartet and a new work by David Lang were enticing enough. Yet one had to wonder how four fiddlers would fit into the 40,000 square‑foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.
Except they didn’t. The once unused Officers Room has been renovated. Instead of the Drill Hall largesse, the Attacca comfortably played in a grand salon of mahogany and faux leather seats. Two candelabras were hoisted by Civil War metallic chains, while the background paintings, in 10‑foot‑high frames, were of three Civil War officers.
(They were too immaculately costumed to indict us with a painted Hegseth bellicosity!)
Not that the Attacca Quartet could be diverted by anything non‑musical. For 15 years now, these Juilliard friends have shared the post‑Kronos attitudes, that nothing is beyond them. The Attacca plays Renaissance and Caroline Shaw. Composers have created avant‑garde for them, and I heard them several times in church crypts playing Beethoven.
More important is how they play. No matter what the works last night, they had the kind of shiny brightness which older European groups might shun. And while much of the music was highly virtuosic, they brought out melodies and turned the slightest nuances to dominant phrases.
Certainly that was true with the two movements of David Lang’s daisy. Besides his always gorgeous sounds, Mr. Lang bases his music on singular inspirations. daisy was based on Lyndon Johnson’s “anti‑war” commercial of a toddler planting a daisy, while a nuclear explosion goes off in the background.
That was “daisy one,” starting with the two violins, chirping, seemingly imitating each other but actually playing different motives. A lesser composer would evolve that into an earth‑shaking climactic sforzando. Mr. Lang gave all the string players increasingly complex canonic themes.
The ending I could only label a “Devil’s Ostinato”. For about four minutes, all the instruments played a fast melody together. Except that they weren’t together. The notes were the same, but the bowing was obviously different. (Was it aleatoric? Did he hide some quarter‑tones? I don’t know.) The result was frightening, menacing, most of all unnerving.
Mr. Lang, present for this New York premiere, gave a more pacific second movement, ending with a l‑o‑o‑ng held pianissimo. Mr. Lang rarely delves into blatant mysticism, and musically I was more entranced by the “atomic bomb” first movement. So, if not as religious or exciting, we had here Mr. Lang’s heartfelt “Amen.”
The preceding Haydn “Dream” Quartet showed Josef Haydn in a mood both happy and... well, infantile. Those first four measures resembled the most naive nursery rhyme. And knowing Papa’s proclivity, he was probably challenging himself to write something even children would enjoy.
But only for that childish start, After that, the tricky composer opened up his can of counterpoints, and Attacca played with its usual multi‑watt radiance. The “dream” was a dreamy slow movement, though the Attacca was a smidgeon too volatile. The Minuet, though, was an exercise with perfectly paced grace notes and a surprising change of meter right at the end. The finale had no tricks, but was as jaunty as their finale Bartók.
B. Bartók/D. Lang (© Peter Serling)
Before the Bartók, they played a rather long Attacca-composed Nocturne with an amorphous description:
“Originally written by a composer such as Chopin.”
This was relatively long, contrapuntally complex, with quotes by Chopin (and possibly others) interlaced by original material.
Perhaps it was unfortunate to come between Lang and Bartók.
The asset was that one finally could cease listening to the gorgeous music of the named composers, and listen to the gorgeous playing of the group.
Those opening few bars of the Bartók were–like the preceding Lang and Haydn–masks to hide the hijinks to come, played with utmost assurance, Of course the great bang of pizzicato against wood (played with joy by violist Nathan Schram) . Of course those wild glissandi, jumping from string to string. Of course plenty of other pranks. One could imagine–with his utmost seriousness–that he had his “Haydn moments” of japery. And Attacca had the youthful experience to make it work.
Rather than locomotion, they played with the same grace, even delicacy they gave to the famed “night music.”
From the third movement, we had less clarity, more idiosyncrasy. Starting with cellist Andrew Yee’s beautiful solo song. (Ms. Yee didn’t really need a cello at all. Her face and body language from start to finish replicated every measure, every note of the evening.)
The pizzicato fourth movement, was the Magyar Bartók, and all four players came close to giving a rustic and physical enthusiasm. As to the finale, I leave it to scholars to assay its relationship to the “arc”. I simply sat back and felt, felt the familiar first movement themes and the happiest Hungarian dance tones. The result was both utter elation and a kind of sadness.
For we had more than a pairing here. We had that rustic wooden hall with its splendid acoustics. Music which was always either enthralling of interesting. Best of all, we had four players who merged the first two virtues. Had they decided to continue with an encore of Schubert of John Dowland or Alban Berg, or the entire Beethoven string canon, I, for one, would have been delighted.
Harry Rolnick
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