BANDCAMP DAILY: The Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019
BANDCAMP DAILY: The Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019
BY PETER MARGASAK
“Caroline Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2013 vocal composition Partita, composed for Roomful of Teeth, an ensemble in which she sings. But her first connection to classical music was as a violinist—an instrument at which she continues to excel. On this enjoyable collection of quartets composed for Attacca Quartet, she reveals her ongoing ardor for the format while subtly reimagining its possibilities. Accordingly, her liner notes cast the work not as an album but rather a garden, tended to by herself and Attacca.
Rather than upend tradition, Shaw embraces it, while jiggering compositional mechanisms to see where things go. The stately ‘Entr’acte’ experiments with a key shift used in Haydn’s ‘Op. 77, No. 2,’ spreading it all over the piece to implant a tension that perpetually threatens to topple the sense of grace. The five movements of ‘Plan & Elevation’ sprinkle in fragments of Ravel and Mozart, as well as some of Shaw’s own past works, while ‘Limestone & Felt’ succeeds at conjuring a variety of tactile sensations, whether deploying feather-stroke pizzicato or jagged snapping.”