Charles Petzold

Caroline Shaw is a Pulitzer Prize winning composer, and also a vocalist and violinist. Andrew Yee is the cellist of the Attacca Quartet, and also a composer. The collaborations between the two are are consistently fascinating, as demonstrated last night at Merkin Hall in a marvelously entertaining free concert as part of Kaufman Music Center’s Just in Time series.

The concert consisted of seven pieces starting with the Sarabande from Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013. Originally composed for an 8-voice a cappella choir, Shaw frequently adapts her music for different instruments. In this rendition, Yee’s cello accompanied her synthesizer-processed voice.

For the second piece, Caroline Shaw’s 2009 composition in manus tuas, Yee left the stage while Shaw played an amplified violin. Becoming more evident as the composition proceeded, Yee was accompanying her offstage like echoes or a reminiscence of music once heard.

Then we heard a composition by Andrew Yee — an homage to the 7,000 trees in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. To Yee’s cello, Caroline Shaw sang the names of many of the trees, the accumulated effect of which was strangely moving.

The longest composition was Caroline Shaw’s 2010 By and By, which I’ve heard before and just love. It was originally written for voice and string quartet, but here Andrew Yee handled the entire accompiment. Shaw has taken lyrics from bluegrass and gospel but written wholly different musical arrangements, ending with the gospel song “I’ll Fly Away” that was accompanied by ominous slaps on the body of the cello.

A work for solo cello titled The Light After (if I heard correctly) was composed by Andrew Yee for the end of the pandemic, featuring glassandi, strumming, and a long passage of multi-string arpeggios.

Next up was a surprise, but something also apparently associated with the pandemic. Andrew Yee mentioned that while cooped up in his home he had been working on a one-person version of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. What we heard was the famous slow movement for cello and piano, “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus.” For the piano part — which consists of slow beating chords — Caroline Shaw sang beats into a processing synthesizer that split her voice into the notes of each chord. This was a real treat, and done so well that even Messiaen purists would have a hard time objecting.

The concert concluded with Limestone & Felt, Caroline Shaw’s 2012 composition originally for cello and viola, at first contrasting hard percussive pizzicato with softer melodic pizzicato (as the title might suggest), and then mixing in a variety of arco playing with the pizzicato. This was the closest thing in the concert to a “normal” duet, yet musically as inventive as anything else on the program.