Caroline Shaw: The Wheel I Giardini

• Caroline Shaw (b. 1982): Thousandth Orange:
• 1Shaw: Thousandth Orange10:24
• Gustave Le Gray:
• 2Shaw: Gustave Le Gray14:24
• The Wheel:
• 3Shaw: The Wheel10:23
• Boris Kerner:
• 4Shaw: Boris Kerner07:38
• In manus tuas:
• 5Shaw: In manus tuas06:57
• Limestone & Felt:
• 6Shaw: Limestone & Felt06:03
• Total Runtime55:49

Info for Caroline Shaw: The Wheel

For the American composer Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’, she told BBC Music Magazine. The youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Shaw has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms. She has even toured the US with Kanye West and appeared in the hit HBO series Mozart in the Jungle . . . Good food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before you find there’s much more underneath’. As the journalist Kate Wakeling points out: ‘This sounds much like Shaw’s own music. Her work combines immediate, sensuous appeal with taut structural rigour.’ This album is the outcome of a meeting between the composer and David Violi, Pauline Buet and their partners from I Giardini. It presents a monograph of chamber music, including a world premiere recording, The Wheel , a dialogue between the voice of the cello and the piano.

I Giardini

I Giardini
Founded in 2012 under the impetus of its two artistic directors, cellist Pauline Buet and pianist David Violi, I Giardini is a collective of inspired and committed artists from among the most talented of their generation, united around a common sensibility and a shared joy in live performance onstage. Having made a space for free activity and adventurous exploration, I Giardini takes its inspiration from the sheer variety of musical sonorities, and the capacity of its team of artists to reveal a unique Romantic universe of living performance. It prizes above all a sense of musical rigour, combined with a permanent openness to other points of view and forms of expression. At the heart of their approach isthe joint programming of composers of fame and influence alongside those still waiting to be discovered – e.g. Fauré with Chausson, Mélanie Bonis and Fernand de La Tombelle, Schumann with Philippe Hersant.

I Giardini’s empathy with the music of today led the ensemble in 2021 to commission ‘The Wheel’ from contemporary American composer Caroline Shaw, supported by Music Strasbourg, Montepellier Opera, Lieu Unique Nantes, Musique Rive Gauche Paris, and Face Foundation New York. Since its formation I Giardini has appeared at the principal concert venues in France (the Musée d’Orsay, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Arsenal de Metz, TAP Poitiers, Opéra de Lille, Fondation Royaumont, Variations Classiques Annecy), as well as internationally.

Their last recording project for Alpha Classics with soprano Véronique Gens was nominated at the Victoires de La Musiques 2021 and awarded the Diapason d’Or 2020. The Mécénat Musical Société Générale and La Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations are I Giardini’s major sponsors.

Booklet for Caroline Shaw: The Wheel