Caroline Shaw / Cody Edgerton

The song trilogy Is A Rose, written for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, juxtaposes poetry from the 18th and 21st centuries, an appropriate complement to a Baroque orchestra playing contemporary music. The first installment was Robert Burns’s ballad Red, Red Rose, written in 1794 and composed in 2016. This was followed the next year by The Edge, to a text by the living British poet Jacob Polley. The centerpiece, written and composed in 2019, is Shaw’s own existential meta-musing on Burns, Gertrude Stein, and the composer’s creative task.

The Edge is most clearly related to its Baroque ancestors. Following an introduction that warms from “steely” to “buoyant” with the entrance of an oboe solo, the orchestra introduces a recurring passage in the sarabande rhythm of Handel’s aria Lascia ch’io pianga that precedes, accompanies, and concludes the song. Unconstrained by this rhythm, the vocal line declaims the poem “with freedom & warmth.” In a rondo-like form, the recurrence of the introspective refrain “Where does the grace of the moment go” is separated by two climactic arcs of accelerating motion, rising pitch, and mounting dynamics.

And So begins with harpsichord supporting the nonchalant text in the manner of a lute-song. Following a brief unaccompanied soliloquy, a fabric of lilting string figures, as circuitous as Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose,” underscores the voice. The poet/composer wryly reflects on her own condition by answering a couplet by Burns (“When a’ the seas rise high, my dear/And the rocks melt with the sun…”) with one of her own (“Will the memory of us/Still rhyme with anyone…”). Following a reprise of the lute-song texture, the strings and harpsichord return to the rhythmically repetitive motive, an endless clockwork in response to “And so we stay, on borrowed time.”

The metrical regularity and rhyme scheme of Burns’s Scottish song Red, Red Rose invite a more traditional approach to the text. The folk-like ballad leisurely unfolds after a freely intoned introduction over a pizzicato bass. An undulating string ostinato, later taken up by the harpsichord, accompanies the entrance of the oboe in the second stanza. A churning figure in the lower strings (“And the rocks melt with the sun”) is picked up by the harpsichord, whose delicate brilliance evokes an image of the running sands of time. Following the final stanza, reminiscences of the text trail off into an ethereal humming by the orchestra players.

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