Entr’acte, for string orchestra

Shaw originally wrote Entr’acte in 2011 for the Brentano String Quartet, which gave the premiere in April of that year at Princeton University. She adapted it for string orchestra in 2014 on commission from Boston-based string orchestra A Far Cry. First Boston Symphony Orchestra performance: August 15, 2025, at Tanglewood, Dima Slobodeniouk conducting. 

Caroline Shaw is a violinist; she took up the instrument at age 2 (her mother was a Suzuki method instructor) and eventually earned a master’s degree in violin performance from Yale University. She actively performs on both Baroque and modern violin. It was as a member of the Franklin String Quartet in New York City that she wrote her first piece for the string quartet medium, Punctum; she has since written several more quartets, expanding some of these, including Punctum and Entr’acte, into works for string orchestra. Her violin concerto Lo is in her repertoire as a performer.

Caroline Shaw is also a singer. She is a member of the virtuoso, Grammy-winning vocal band Roomful of Teeth, which came into being at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. It was for that group that Shaw wrote what is probably her best-known piece, the highly entertaining, difficult, scintillating Partita, which combines a love for language with a deep sense of what it means to perform. Shaw won the Pulitzer Prize for that work, becoming the youngest-ever recipient of the award. It was only at that point that she realized she was, fully, a composer, in spite of working at that aspect of her musicianship for many years.

So Shaw is a composer, and much else: her all-encompassing engagement in life as a musician also includes teaching and a vast range of collaborative projects, including some very high-profile ones with such superstar pop artists as Nas and Rosalía. She has written for film and for the stage. Although many of her works have begun as deep and thoughtful glosses on touchpoints in the Western Classical canon, her projects obliterate stylistic boundaries. A recent uncategorizable collaboration with the dynamic Sō Percussion, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, is a case in point. Her Pulitzer-winning Partita is also illustrative—complex, difficult, replete with extended vocal techniques, yet delightful and immediately inviting for the listener. Immersing herself in the world of her performers, she emerges with new and inventive ways of making the point of a piece as directly as possible.

Along with her do-it-yourself and “indie classical” credentials, Shaw has worked with such established ensembles and performers as Jonathan Biss and the Seattle Symphony for the piano concerto Watermark; the Los Angeles Philharmonic for The Observatory, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, vocalists Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Davóne Tines, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and the Aizuri, Brentano, Dover, and Miró string quartets. The Attacca Quartet has released two albums of her music for string quartet, which are especially well-traveled works. Her quartet Blueprint was performed on Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music in 2017 and by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2020, and the BSO commissioned the version for string orchestra of her Punctum.

Punctum grew out of Shaw’s experience as a performer and listener fascinated by J.S. Bach’s varied and subtle transformations of a Lutheran hymn in his St. Matthew Passion. Entr’acte has a similar origin story. As a violinist, Shaw performed many of Joseph Haydn’s string quartets as a matter of course. She wrote Entr’acte after hearing a performance by the Brentano String Quartet of Haydn’s late quartet in F, Opus 77, No. 2. Entr’acte is a meditation on a moment from that quartet. The composer writes:

Entr’acte was written in 2011 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. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.

Haydn has inspired composers for 250 years with his wit and occasional undeniable and often charming strangeness—characteristics Shaw amplifies in this piece. The listener quickly realizes this is no transcription or set of variations as Shaw uses silence, a little surrealism, extended performance techniques, and the radical stretching of a moment in time to create something new from something familiar.

ROBERT KIRZINGER

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.