Review: Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion create eclectic, alluring music mix at Walker Art Center

Near the end of Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion’s performance at the Walker Art Center on Saturday, the group performed a cover of Franz Schubert’s “An die Musik” (“To Music,”) composed in 1817 for solo voice and piano. Schubert’s simple and stirring melody, a loving gratitude letter to an art form, glowed with reverberation in Shaw and Sō Percussion’s treatment of it, opening the tune up with enveloping rhythms and a celestial sound.

The piece made a nice connection with the Schubert Club, which presented the evening’s concert along with the Walker Art Center as part of Schubert Club Mix. The series shakes up how audiences think about classical music by releasing it from formal expectations. In this case, the audience was treated to an experience of chamber vocal and percussive sounds, with a pop sensibility swirled into the blend.

Shaw, a singer, composer and violinist, and Sō Percussion, a four-member percussive group, nabbed a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2022 for their previous collaboration, “Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (2021).” This year, they released “Rectangles and Circumstance,” and on Saturday they played music from both albums. The concert also featured Shaw’s duo with partner and vocalist Danni Lee Parpan, called Ringdown.

Amid a set made of glow tape-adorned blankets, video projection and hand-held lighting designed by Mark DeChiazza, Sō Percussion’s many instruments spread out across the stage: synthesizers of various kinds, steel drums, marimba and xylophone, and also things like plant pots, instruments submerged in water, service bells, and more.

The group’s members— Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting— are all adroit players, whether playing solo or in concert with other instruments. At several moments, they all hunched around one instrument, and at one point circled around a drum set, playing together like an eight-armed drummer. In “Lay All Your Love On Me,” based on an ABBA song, the four musicians gathered around a marimba, playing together exuberantly. They even employed words as a percussive tool, creating rhythms out of language, like in Treuting’s “Sense.”

Shaw’s bell-like voice carried no vibrato, instead emanating a clear, pure tone. Her voice was often not heard alone. Even when she was the only singer on stage, her voice was at times heard in harmony. Pre-recorded vocal sounds were layered into the music, like the mesmerizing “Long Ago,” where grunts, gasps and singing emerged from a drum kit, played in conversation with Shaw’s singing.

Shaw also looped her own voice, creating live sampled harmonies in “This Silently Invisibly,” set to a William Blake poem. Shaw incorporated repetition and echoing into the lyrics themselves as well. In “Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part,” Shaw made her singing voice take on aspects of multiple singers performing in a round.

About halfway through the show, Parpan and Shaw performed several tunes together. Their voices are quite different from one another. Parpan has more of a belt, adding embellishments in her performance style, where Shaw’s voice remained much simpler. Together their different styles blended well. Shaw looped a violin track in one tune. It had an off-kilter sound that was quite magnetic even if, as they revealed afterward, the performance of the tune didn’t go exactly as planned.

Throughout the evening, lyrics at times referred to music itself, and the making of it. These were all music artists who seemed to enjoy not just playing the songs for the audience, but revealing just how much delight they had in creating it.