Is there any way to concat not uppercased strings

Let's have this selection:

$table->select('CONCAT("Some NOT ", "uppercased string")');

NDB will resolve not uppercased (and lowercase) words as column names and tries to escape them with backticks, so the result is this, which is obviously wrong:

SELECT CONCAT("Some NOT ", "`uppercased` `string`") FROM `table`;

Question:
Is there some magic operator which can force NDB to not escape those words?

I know I can use MySQL function LCASE(‘UPPERCASED STRING’) to bypass this, but in my case I don't know what the concatenated string is and I need to preserve its case.