Notes on the Program

by Aaron Grad

Caroline Shaw
Born in Greenville, North Carolina, 1982

Entr’acte (2011, rev. 2014

Caroline Shaw is one of the most celebrated composers alive today, but even after becoming the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 (not to mention the winner of five Grammy Awards and counting), she still identifies herself simply as a musician — a term that encompasses her work as a violinist, singer, improviser, and producer. She began studying violin at the age of two with her mother, a Suzuki teacher, and she formed her own string quartet while growing up in Greenville, North Carolina. Still, she waited until 2009 to compose the first in what has become a groundbreaking series of quartets. The Attacca Quartet recorded six of those works, including Entr’Acte from 2011, on an album that won the 2020 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.

Shaw was inspired to create Entr’acte (a theater term for music that separates two acts) after hearing a string quartet by Joseph Haydn. What she wrote about Haydn could just as easily be applied to her own imaginative sound effects and extended techniques: “I love the way some music suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, Technicolor transition.” The ensemble A Far Cry commissioned this version for string ensemble in 2014, and it has become one of Shaw’s most performed pieces.

Béla Bartók
Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania), 1881
Died in New York, 1945

Romanian Folk Dances (1915)

When Béla Bartók was studying music at the Budapest Academy, he and other young Hungarians training to be serious composers learned to imitate mainstream German and Austrian styles. It was only after graduating, during a trip to a resort in what is now Slovakia, that Bartók had a revelation that changed the course of his life and music — all because he happened to overhear a maid singing a folk song. He became determined to understand and preserve Hungary’s wealth of local folk traditions, and his tireless efforts to catalog regional melodies essentially created the field of ethnomusicology.

In works like the Romanian Folk Dances from 1915, Bartók did not try to sanitize the authentic folk melodies by adding generic Western harmonies, nor did he pretend that his transcriptions for concert instruments would precisely recreate the nuanced inflections he captured on wax cylinder recordings of folk musicians. Instead, he developed a personal approach to these tunes that wrapped them in sparse and surprising accompaniments, blurring the line between composition and arrangement. Bartók first wrote the Romanian Folk Dances for solo piano, and he made his own arrangement for small orchestra. This version, adapted for string orchestra by Orpheus violist Dov Scheindlin, uses the violin transcription by Bartók’s friend Zoltán Székely as a point of departure.

Noah Bendix-Balgley
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, 1984

Fidl-Fantazye: A Klezmer Concerto (2016)

Noah Bendix-Balgley began playing the violin at age four, and his talents have allowed him to rise to one of the most esteemed chairs in any orchestra worldwide as the First Concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. During his earlier tenure as the concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Bendix-Balgley composed and premiered this score that drew on his other lifelong passion: klezmer music.

As he explained in a note on his website, Bendix-Balgley grew up surrounded by live klezmer performances and recordings through his father, a dance teacher with a specialty in Eastern European and Yiddish traditions. His vision for Fidl-Fantazye was “to write a virtuosic violin fantasy accompanied by full orchestra, composing my own tunes in the style of traditional ones I have learned over the years.” He brought on the esteemed — German-American composer Samuel Adler (who literally wrote the book on orchestration) to arrange the orchestral accompaniment.

Bendix-Balgley’s original tunes reference specific traditions, including a khosidl (“a slow and heavy line dance in the old Hassidic style”), doina (“Romanian-style improvisation”) and syrtos (“mixed meter music of the Greek islands that was absorbed into klezmer music”), all just in the first of the three interconnected movements. The middle movement incorporates a “slow Nigun or Lid, a wordless song which then becomes a Hora,” followed in the final section by “an extended medley of fast tunes” that becomes “a wild race to the finish.”

Johannes Brahms
Born in Hamburg, 1833
Died in Vienna, 1897

Selections from 21 Hungarian Dances (1868)

When Hungary revolted against the Austrian Empire in 1848, many political refugees fled for America, often sailing from Hamburg, Germany — the hometown of Johannes Brahms. The music those travelers brought with them, ranging from rural folksongs to urban dance styles, had a profound impact on Brahms at the impressionable age of 15.

That firsthand contact with Hungarian music informed Brahms’ wildly popular and profitable Hungarian Dances, a series of 21 short works published between 1869 and 1880 in the popular amateur format of four hands on one piano. (Brahms later transcribed them for solo piano and arranged several for orchestra.) In a letter to his publisher, Brahms proclaimed the dances “genuine children of the Puszta and Gypsies — not, therefore, created by me, rather just reared on bread and milk.” The term “Puszta” referred to the vast Hungarian plain, populated for millennia by the Magyar people; “Gypsies” (or Romani people, as is now the preferred term) migrated into Hungarian lands beginning around the 13th century, bringing their own musical culture that never fully assimilated.

This collection, orchestrated for Orpheus by Zachary Wadsworth, samples nine of the Hungarian Dances, starting with the intense mood swings of No. 4 that are typical of the verbunkos, a style that originated as a military recruiting dance. Brahms probably did not realize that the melody on which he based No. 5 (the last of this set) was no folk song at all, but a modern csárdás by a popular Hungarian composer.

© 2025 Aaron Grad