The Attacca Quartet rewarded an intrepid audience that dared to venture out in advance of an anticipated bomb cyclone with a compelling program that kept us all spellbound from first note to last. Due to the weather, the players condensed the published program, removing the intermission and a nocturne arrangement.
The ensemble was formed in 2003 by Amy Schroeder (first violin) and Andrew Yee (cello). Nathan Schram (viola) joined in 2015, and Domenic Salerni (second violin) joined in 2020. Beyond the concert hall and the recording studio, they’ve collaborated with Billie Eilish and provided music for film scores and even video games. This is their third appearance at the Gardner, but the first in their current configuration (the previous concerts, reviewed here, were in April and October of 2019). The group came to my attention in 2012 when I became aware of their project “The 68” to play all the Haydn Quartets, which they did over a six-year span from 2010 to 2016. Many of these performances are still available on YouTube and I highly recommend them. Although their completion of this project predates the group’s current configuration, their knowledge of how to find and express Haydn’s humor has not only remained, it has deepened over the past 10 years.
Haydn’s quartets are gifts for amateurs; he dedicated the Opus 50 set (1787) to Frederick William II of Prussia, the cellist-king who also received quartets from Boccherini and Mozart. Having played this piece many times with friends, I was struck by the gap between even a good amateur reading and what professionals can achieve. In the best amateur sessions, we negotiate in real time, deciding what matters and adjusting on the fly. The Attacca had clearly arrived with a shared vision. That preparation freed each player to be spontaneous in the moment, confident the others would be right there with them.
Haydn’s Op. 50 No. 5, “The Dream,” opens with a joke: the violins pose a jaunty theme that seems to call for a reply from below. Silence. They try again to no avail. At last they answer themselves; only then do the viola and cello stir and imitate them, prompting an exasperated forte outburst. A brief pause, and the group gathers itself and moves on together. Schroeder’s ornaments felt both daring and improvised while Yee’s arpeggios growled with authority. In the central “Dream” movement, the group opened with a serene hush. Schroeder produced an especially sweet sound from her instrument, using a period-style bow by the late John Aniano, used for the Haydn alone. The Minuet grows from a single ornamental gesture, and Schroeder found fresh character in each recurrence. In the Finale, where Haydn repeatedly asks the first violin to play sopra una corda — comically clambering up a single string for an arpeggio instead of easily changing strings as would be easier and more natural — Schroeder got a laugh from the audience with her first brazen rendition. But she didn’t go for the same laugh twice. Each return brought a new gesture: balanced, boisterous, then barnyard. The highlight, though, was her impromptu cadenza, which evoked a smile and a chuckle from Yee before they drove the movement to a decisive close.
Composer David Lang (b. 1957) wrote daisy (2024) for the Attacca, intending it to pair with George Crumb’s Black Angels (1970), a piece for “electric string quartet.” Since the July 2025 US premiere (in Newport, RI, reviewed HERE), the Attacca have been consistently pairing it with Bartók’s 4th Quartet (1928) instead. The piece takes its inspiration from the 1964 television ad, “Peace, Little Girl” (aka “Daisy”), in which a little girl counting flower petals is interrupted by a nuclear countdown and a mushroom cloud, followed by the chilling line: “We must either love each other, or we must die.” The ad aired only once, but its impact has lasted. Its two movements are “first daisy” and “second daisy.” In the first, a gentle opening is gradually overwhelmed, chaos mounting until the music is abruptly extinguished. The second begins the same way but charts a different course, a do-over in which fragility is protected rather than destroyed. The Attacca have recorded it and it will be released on a forthcoming album.
Daisy opens with a violin duet reminiscent of the birds chirping in the ad. It expands into a sunny pastorale, tinged with unease. From there, we grow to a fever pitch. The Attacca enunciated rhythms incisively with great precision. Yee used an interesting technique I hadn’t heard before, creating a percussive depth to sustained notes by accentuating bow changes. Their use of cello without endpin allowed Yee to dance along with the music as they played. The first daisy came to a sudden end, like a light going out. In the second movement, the quartet built a new sound world from the same material, at first meditative, almost suspended, then warmer and more open. This time the ending felt like sunset rather than annihilation. As in the Haydn, the ensemble made the narrative arc unmistakable, both sonically and gesturally.
Bartók’s 4th string quartet was premiered in London exactly 97 years ago. Schram recalled the impact the final movement had on him as a young violist and offered pithy descriptors for the five movements: I. “molten Bartók” with “high idea density”, II. “ode to bugs” III. exotic “night music” IV. “Romanian folk music at a bar” V. “string quartet rock”. In the first movement, the Attacca found a surprising spaciousness in this dense music, with vitality, clarity, flow and fun in equal measure. They clearly articulated the formal symmetry without seeming academic; structure supported drama without seeming an end unto itself. In the “ode to bugs,” they used scarcely an inch of bow to create a taut buzz of tense activity. The pervasive imitation felt as theatrical as structural, like a chase scene. Just before the close, the alternating viola and cello glissandi fused into what sounded like a single, newly invented instrument.
The third movement, Bartók’s “night music,” evoking the natural soundscape after dusk, sits at the center of the work and offers each player a solo. The upper voices bloomed into a wide vibrato that felt alive, like the pulsating energy of a meadow. Yee’s cello solo entered at a whisper, but grew in the second strain into something juicier, freer, at times seeming to mock the background vibrato, and at others finding sounds on the cello I didn’t know were there, almost screaming. Schroeder was playful in her solo turn, Salerni richly velvety, while Schram’s skittering harmonics suggested a trapped insect. Even the notated rest before the end felt less like a pause than an exploration of silence. For the pizzicato fourth movement, the group set aside their bows, with Salerni and Schram holding their instruments like guitars. In the round configuration of the hall this slightly skewed the projection, but the balance held, and the signature Bartók pizzicati snapped cleanly. The movement felt hypnotic yet over too soon.
The Attacca launched into the last movement with rare verve, leaning into the rock and roll of it all with bow hairs breaking left and right. Schram’s percussive viola line provided crackling energy. The violins flirted with a country inflection that maintained a wildness to folk material. Yee drew an unexpectedly metallic edge from his cello, amplifying the “rock” character Schram had promised. The closing Pesante chords, dense and unyielding, landed with joyous, meaty finality.
The Attacca embraced Calderwood Hall’s “sonic cube,” rotating positions between works and offering shifting perspectives throughout the afternoon. It is an ideal hall for this repertoire: intimate, transparent, almost like chamber music in a living room. During the final movement of Bartók 4, I could feel the floor vibrate under the Romani-inflected rhythms and see the rapt faces across the cube.
Anyone who stayed home for the storm missed more than a well-played concert. They missed an opportunity to hear one of the great ensembles of this generation delivering Haydn, Bartók, and Lang with originality, clarity, and infectious energy. The Attacca’s unique ability to illustrate structure with gesture and character was on full display. I’ll be thinking about this concert for a long time.