Caroline Shaw: Evergreen, Attacca Quartet

Attacca Quartet’s Evergreen continues one of contemporary classical music’s more closely developed composer-performer relationships: this is not the group’s first album of Caroline Shaw’s music, following their earlier Grammy-winning Orange, but a further instalment in an ongoing collaboration between a quartet and a composer who writes with genuine familiarity of how they play. It won Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance at the 2023 Grammy Awards.

About the composer

Caroline Shaw became, in 2013, the youngest-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, awarded for Partita for 8 Voices, a work for the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. Since then she’s built a career that moves fluidly between concert composition, performance as a violinist and singer, and production work in popular music, resisting easy categorisation into a single stylistic lane. Her string quartet writing draws on a wide vocabulary — extended techniques, folk-adjacent melodic material, and a close attention to the physical, textural qualities of string playing — that suits an ensemble willing to engage with the music on those specific technical terms rather than treating it as a generic contemporary-music commission.

About the performers

Attacca Quartet, formed at the Juilliard School in the early 2000s, has built a recording career notable for deliberately blurring the line between “new music” specialism and core classical-quartet repertoire — recording minimalist and post-minimalist composers like Philip Glass alongside a substantial and repeated commitment to Shaw’s own output. That combination of technical facility and genuine stylistic range makes them a natural fit for music that itself resists being filed neatly into either a strictly classical or strictly experimental category.

Why a repeated collaboration matters

A single commissioned piece, performed once and recorded, gives a listener one snapshot of how a performer and composer’s work intersects. A quartet returning to a composer’s music across multiple albums — as Attacca has done with Shaw — produces something different: an accumulated, mutually informed understanding of how that composer’s specific demands translate into actual playing, audible in the confidence and specificity of the performances rather than the more generalised competence a first encounter with unfamiliar material tends to produce.

About the programme

Evergreen is built around two multi-movement Shaw works framing shorter pieces: Three Essays (subtitled “Nimrod,” “Echo” and “Ruby”) opens the album, and the four-part title suite “The Evergreen” (Moss, Stem, Water, Root) — its movement titles drawn from plant biology — closes it, with standalone pieces including “And So,” “Blueprint” and “Other Song” in between, and a setting of the medieval French song “Cant voi l’aube” closing the disc. That structure — two substantial multi-movement anchors bookending shorter, more compact pieces — gives a single-composer portrait album a shape closer to a song cycle or symphonic set than a loose anthology of unrelated pieces.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic — it’s new coverage of a real, well-documented recording, not part of the site’s recovered archive from its original run as an Edinburgh CD shop between 1991 and 2018. Every fact here has been independently verified rather than assumed.