The American string Attacca Quartet performs pieces by Glass, Adams and Caroline Shaw at Madrid’s CentroCentro.
The 2023 season of the Ausencias concert series held monthly in Madrid, in the CentroCentro municipal auditorium, ends this evening at 19:30, with a true golden finale: a concert by the American string Attacca Quartet, winner of two Grammy Awards for best chamber music recording, in 2020 for Caroline Shaw: Orange, and in 2023 for Evergreen. Both are recordings of compositions by the American Caroline Shaw (Greenville, 1982), one of the leading personalities in music today, winner in 2012, when she was 30 years old, of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Partita for 8 Voices.
The programme to be performed this evening by the Attacca Quartet consists of three pieces from their usual repertoire, and will begin with String Quartet No. 3, “Mishima”, by Philip Glass (included in their 2021 album Of All Joys); Entr’acte, by Caroline Shaw (included in the aforementioned Caroline Shaw: Orange), and String Quartet No. 1, by John Adams (included in their 2013 album Fellow Traveler – The Complete String Quartet Works of John Adams).
Attaca Quartet, which this year has been celebrating its twentieth anniversary, has been led since its foundation in 2003 by first violinist Amy Schroeder and cellist Andrew Lee, with the other two members, second violinist Domenic Salerni and violist Nathan Schram, having joined in 2020.
The Ausencias cycle is curated by the Desclasificados collective, formed by Lucía Arnaud and Baldur Brönnimann, with the aim of “disseminating, promoting and supporting contemporary music”.