Caroline Shaw

Entr'acte

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12 MINUTES

 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Composition in 2013, Shaw was the award’s youngest recipient ever at the age of 30. Shaw composed Entr'acte after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2, “with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet,” she writes in her composer’s note to the score. “I love the way that some music suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, Technicolor transition.”

 

Originally composed in 2011 for string quartet, Shaw revised it in 2014 for string orchestra. It is structured like a minuet with two trios but creates a series of time warps—Classical music displaced a couple or more centuries in all directions. Shaw’s so-called “minuet” retains an appropriate Classical structure (two strains, repeated in the beginning and without repeats at the end).

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 

Sinfonia Concertante for Winds

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30 MINUTES

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Allegro

Adagio

Andantino con variazioni

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Music historians are still debating whether this composition can truly be attributed to Mozart. They would agree that no composer understood wind instruments better than Mozart, so the solo lines are composed with a deep understanding for their unique qualities: the oboe’s expressive, penetrating voice; the clarinet’s liquid fluency over a wide range; the horn’s elegant adventures in its upper octave; and the bassoon’s many functions as bass line, tenor line, or tune. This masterwork requires both sensitivity and virtuosity from the soloists.

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