Attacca Quartet, Kings Place review - bridging the centuries in sound

Memorably described by Gramophone magazine as the “new kids on the classical block…with lavish pocket money”, Apple’s London-based label Platoon is busy cementing its street cred with an ongoing concert series at Kings Place.

If BIS (bought by Apple in 2024) remain the old-school, traditionalist offering, then Platoon are the edgy, digital younger sibling. So far the roster includes violinist Daniel Pioro, rising violin star Stella Chen, conductor Dalia Stasevska and now the Grammy-winning American Attacca String Quartet, whose new recording of the Ravel String Quartet put them in the spotlight last night.

But before the Ravel, the UK premiere of David Lang’s daisy. Composed for Venice’s Biennale Musica (where it was premiered by the Attaccas last year), the commission came with few – but striking – stipulations: it had to share a programme with George Crumb’s Black Angels, and it had to reference Vivaldi.

Crumb’s score-marking “in tempore belli” provides the starting point for a piece that looks – albeit less directly – into a future at war. LBJ’s famous political ad involving a small girl counting petals, cut short by a mushroom-cloud explosion, inspires two movements – “first daisy” and “second daisy” – imagining alternative outcomes for the flower.

You can hear memories of Vivaldi’s Spring in the eddying exchanges between Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni’s two violins that blur and flicker in and out of one another over barely-there plucked accompaniment from Nathan Schram’s viola and Andrew Yee’s cello. It’s a folk-sweet little theme, gradually intensified as the viola joins the close-woven melody and volume swells. Both movements play out the same process: an exercise in musical tipping points. When and how does something fragile and lyrical tip into violence? How many times can you say something before repetition itself negates the sweetness of what’s being said? Lang’s post-minimal processes supply two different answers.

The quartet’s lean, astringent tone did little to cloud the clarity of the musical structures, exposing Lang’s workings with unsentimental directness, leaning into the close-imitation and smudgy, just-offset movement that explores what ugliness, aggression might sound like without dissonance. What started off as eddying echoes found first a deep groove, before crystallising into siren-like wail.

Introduced from the stage by Yee (pictured above with Schroeder, Salerni and Schram), the Ravel was framed as the beginning not just of 20^th but 21^st-century string-quartet writing. This seemed to be the thesis behind an account that drew heavy lines from the composer’s delicately plucked raindrops to the motoric patterns of minimalism and beyond – an argument at its strongest in the blustering 5/4 that launches the finale (as well as the blazing heat that dispatches it), but one stretched close to breaking elsewhere.

There’s a glassy quality to the quartet’s sound, especially Schroeder’s first violin, which suits this music well. But sustained across the first three movements (it’s telling that mutes came and went without obviously changing tone-colour already filed down to translucency, playing suspending the music in mid-air) it risked monotony. Schroeder’s portamenti felt out of place in this contemporary sound-world, blowsy in context, and for such a brisk, sinewy interpretation, oddly cloying. Schram and Salerni generated plenty of ebb and flow in the middle of the texture, but were persistently recessed by Yee’s surging cello. The overall effect was of music overworked, however interestingly – lacking a freshness that gives even classic accounts like the Emersons’ a greater sense of contemporaneity.

• More classical reviews on theartsdesk