Entr'acte

Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte uses a Haydn minuet and trio as its launchpad, but the imaginative results are more surrealist than neoclassical. Shaw composed the single-movement string quartet in 2011, two years before she became the youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music. She was inspired by the Brentano Quartet’s rendition of Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 77, No. 2, and notably the musicians’ “spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio” in the minuet movement. “I love the way some music suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass,” she writes, “in a kind of absurd, subtle, Technicolor transition.” Entr’acte unfolds like a theme-and-variations form, with the pensive, halting opening theme leading to sections featuring pizzicatos (plucked sounds), minimalism, echoes of Bartók, and wispy abstraction before the opening material returns. A violinist herself, Shaw shows a grasp of the colouristic possibilities of the string quartet in Entr’acte, making it her best-known work in the form; it has appeared on a Grammy Award-winning album by Attacca Quartet and in arrangements for wind ensemble and for string orchestra.