PROGRAM NOTES

Caroline Shaw

Entr’acte

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. -

Caroline Shaw

Osvaldo Golijov

Um Dia Bom

(A Good Day)

What I love above all about Brooklyn Rider’s performances - of any music they play - is the bubble of time, or time-asspace, that they create, enveloping the music and us, the listeners. No matter how much is happening at any given moment, we always find room to hear everything with clarity and space to breathe. It’s an experience perfectly described by Borges in The Aleph, and illustrated in the bullet scene in The Matrix. Two of my favorite soccer players, Andres Iniesta and Zinedine Zidane, also have that superpower. And Mozart’s music, too, happens always in that ‘bubble of no time’, as does Chick Corea’s, whose presence I felt while writing Um Dia Bom. It is a quality to which I’ve always aspired in my music, and rarely achieved. Sooner or later, pathos takes over. No complaints; as the scorpion would say, “it’s in my nature”.

But I was diligent about getting there in Um Dia Bom. I wrote with thick marker on the large whiteboard next to my piano a list of guiding principles for this piece: Clarity. Line. Light. Elegance. Grace. Delight. Rhythm. Air in the Harmonies. Counterpoint. Make Believe (Representation). Child Wonder. I like to think they are all here, with the exception perhaps of counterpoint, which remains highest on my bucket list of things I want to learn.

Um Dia Bom is just that, A Good Day. Its five movements depict a life from morning to midnight and beyond, but as if told to children. Hovering in the Cradle, the opening movement tries to paint the infinite potential in the eyes of a newborn child. There might be a fairy hovering, or it’s simply the child’s eyes wondering. The second movement, …while the rain… started as a blessing I wrote for the marriage of my oldest daughter, Talia, to Yevgeni, her husband. It takes off from the poem that Vivaldi wrote to accompany the second movement of Winter in the Four Seasons: “To spend content and quiet days near the fire, while, outside, the rain soaks hundreds” You can hear the rain throughout this movement, while a dancing couple glides on the marble floors of an Italian palazzo. Around the Fire, the third movement, is a traditional Yiddish song that also talks about the bliss of being together around a small fire. In my version, the song appears and disappears, as a ghost, in the midst of a slow processional and restrained tears. Schubert’s motif of the slow movement of Death and the Maiden is in the background throughout that first section. A different manifestation of Death interrupts the processional in a short and furiously