Evergreen

Nonesuch Records releases Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award–winning composer Caroline Shaw’s Evergreen, featuring Shaw and Attacca Quartet.  Evergreen is five original works by Shaw: three pieces written for string quartet – Three Essays, Blueprint, and The Evergreen – and two songs written for string quartet and voice.  It also includes an interpretation of a twelfth century French poem, which the Quartet performs with Shaw on vocals.

Following 2019’s Orange, which featured six of Shaw’s pieces for string quartet and earned a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, Evergreen was built around the titular four-song suite, commissioned and first performed by Third Angle in March 2020.  Shaw describes the work as an offering to one particular tree in an evergreen forest on Swiikw (Galiano Island), off the west coast of Canada.  The album also includes Three Essays, a suite written for and premiered by Calidore String Quartet that addresses language’s power to stir emotion and spread information and ideas through written, spoken, and digital forms; And So, a piece composed for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter as part of Shaw’s Is a Rose trilogy; Blueprint, a work originally composed for the Aizuri Quartet and relating closely to an early string quartet by Beethoven; Other Song, a piece written for the National Symphony Orchestra and originally released on Shaw’s 2021 solo vocal debut, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part; and an interpretation of Cant voi l’aube, a poem by twelfth century trouvère, Gace Brulé.  The complete track list is below.

In addition to the Grammy Award for Attacca Quartet, Orange – which was co-released by New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records – received tremendous critical acclaim.  BBC Radio 3 called it ‘completely gorgeous in so many ways… It hits you everywhere, all at once’, and NPR said it is ‘a love letter to the string quartet… when you hear all the imaginative sounds on Orange, you know you’re listening to the voice of a strong composer.’  Pitchfork added that the ‘pieces on Orange shoot off in thrilling and unpredictable directions… The music exudes joy and a sense of wildness.’

Shaw released two additional albums on Nonesuch last year – Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, a collaborative album with Sō Percussion and also her solo vocal debut – and the Grammy Award-winning Narrow Sea, featuring Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish, which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.