Contemporary classical music used to be a difficult thing, full of frowning, knotted sounds. Caroline Shaw’s music never frowns. This 44-year-old American, who is the season’s “Composer in Focus” at the Barbican, writes music that caresses the ear with sounds of very delicate, radiant beauty. On Thursday night at Milton Court, the American Attacca String Quartet played the piece that has become Shaw’s signature tune, Entr’acte. They then accompanied the composer in two songs of her own, before moving on to music of a very different, more taxing kind.
Written in 2011, Entr’acte begins teasingly with a drooping phrase that sounds like a half-remembered Baroque song about an abandoned princess. It’s full of stifled pauses and moments where the music’s sensitivity becomes overwrought and tangled up in “wrong notes”, before it finds its way back to luminous clarity. All this the Attacca Quartet projected with exactly the right sensitivity, almost as if they were gingerly tiptoeing round the music rather than actually playing it.
Then on came the composer, who seemed as charming and guileless as her music. She sang two songs based on her own mish-mash of Robert Burns, Shakespeare and other poets, in a light, boy-treble voice, while the quartet spun gentle, vaguely minimalist repeating patterns around her. Despite moments when it became almost assertive, I again had a sense of music that dissolves feelings into beautiful aural thistledown, rather than engaging with them.
To pass from that to John Adams’s latest string quartet Iron Jig was like moving from yin to yang. The sounds were indeed frowning and knotted, and the rhythms jagged and complex, in a way that teased us with hints of the swinging Baroque dance known as the jig. Here and there, the onrush was leavened with gleams of lyricism, beautifully introduced by the quartet’s leader, Amy Schroeder.
It was exhilarating, but the best was saved for last. The quartet, now joined by Shaw on viola, gave us a performance of Mendelssohn’s String Quintet that was simply wonderful in its mingling of onrushing passion and tenderness. But it was the encore, a piece by Shaw for all five musicians, which made the audience whoop and leap to their feet. Clearly there’s something about those oh-so-gentle harmonies circling in the same pattern that connects with the zeitgeist, so all praise to the Barbican for giving us more opportunities to savour it.
Caroline Shaw is Composer in Focus at the Barbican on Oct 29 & 30, Dec 14 and June 15. Details: barbican.org.uk