Jean-Marie Leclair, among the earliest of the great French violinists and composers for his instrument, was one of eight children born to a cellist and master lacemaker in Lyons; all but two of his siblings became professional musicians. Little is known of Leclair’s early life, though he was apparently trained in his father’s trade and spent some time in the family lace business. By the age of nineteen, however, he was dancing with the ballet of the Lyons Opéra, and six years later he was engaged for a season as principal dancer and choreographer at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Turin. Leclair was also active as a violinist at the time and composed several sonatas in 1721; while in Turin, he studied the instrument with Giovanni Battista Somis, a pupil of Corelli and conductor at the theater.

Leclair moved to Paris in 1723, and came under the patronage of Joseph Bonnier, one of France’s richest men, while he prepared twelve of his violin sonatas for publication as his Op. 1. Leclair returned to Turin in 1726 for two further years of study with Somis, after which he settled again in Paris. Leclair created a sensation with his debut in 1728 as a violinist in his own music at the celebrated Concerts Spirituels, where he appeared regularly for the next eight years. His reputation spread to England, Holland, and Germany, where he was acclaimed on his concert tours. In 1733, he was appointed to Louis XV’s household orchestra, but four years later had a falling out with the violinist Pierre Guignon, who was to serve as concertmaster, and resigned. From 1738 to 1743, Leclair held positions at the court of Orange and with a wealthy commoner in The Hague. For a short period in 1744, he was in the employ of the Spanish Prince Don Philippe at his estate at Chambéry in the French Alps, but soon returned to Paris, where he continued to compose and teach. In 1748, he accepted a position with the Duke of Gramont in the Paris suburb of Puteaux.

Twice married, he separated in 1758 from his second wife, largely retired from public life, and moved to a seedy, distant section of Paris. Cut off from his family, he became reclusive and immersed himself in the study of literature. On the night of October 22, 1764, he was stabbed to death as he entered his house. Among the suspects were the gardener who found the body, Leclair’s nephew (with whom he had recently quarreled), and Mme. Leclair herself; all three were cleared after a police investigation. According to Neal Zaslaw, “The evidence (in the French Archives Nationales) is so clearly against the nephew, who was a violinist and author of L’arbre généalogique de l’harmonie (1767), that the only remaining mystery is that he was never brought to trial.”

The six Sonatas for Two Violins, Op. 3 were published in Paris in 1730, two years after Leclair’s sensational debut in that city. The fifth number of the set, in E Minor, comprises three movements, arranged fast–slow–fast: a closely textured Allegro in the style of an allemande; a graceful Gavotte; and a Presto reminiscent of a gigue.

Caroline Shaw made one of the most dramatic entries of any American composer into the consciousness of the music world — in 2013, at age 30, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Partita for 8 Voices, the youngest person ever to receive that award, one of the art world’s most prestigious honors. As with most “overnight successes,” however, Shaw had worked diligently and (obviously) productively since childhood, studying violin since the age of two, composing from age ten, earning Bachelor’s (Rice University, 2004) and Master’s degrees (Yale, 2007) in violin, working on a Doctorate in composition at Princeton, and firmly establishing herself on the New York music scene as a violinist adept in a wide range of styles, a vocalist with the remarkable a cappella ensemble Roomful of Teeth (for whom she wrote Partita, which also received a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Composition in the group’s recording), backup singer and violinist on Saturday Night Live (with Paul McCartney), Letterman (with The National) and The Tonight Show (with The Roots), and collaborator on an album with rapper Kanye West.

Shaw was the inaugural Musician-in-Residence at Dumbarton Oaks (2014-2015) and Resident Composer with Vancouver’s Music on Main (2014-2016). In addition to her Pulitzer Prize, she has been a Rice Goliard Fellow (busking and fiddling in Sweden), a Yale Baroque Ensemble Fellow, and a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, during which she studied historical formal gardens and lived out of a backpack for a year.

Shaw wrote, “Entr’acte was composed in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77, No. 2 in F major — with its spare and soulful shift to an unexpected key for the central trio in the minuet. Entr’acte is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle transition.”

The opening of Entr’acte itself has a sort of ghostly quality, as though its hymn-like theme in simple harmonies and broken phrases is heard from a distance, or a passed time, or through a mist. It suddenly seems to lose its way, slipping into a disjointed phrase, pausing, trying again and then devolving into what is described in the score as “pitchless bow noise.” Fragments of the hymn again emerge from this shadowy sound world.

Entr’acte is rooted in minuet form, which requires that the first section be repeated, so this process is heard again, the second time disintegrating into isolated whistling high notes. The music tries to regain some settled state in the central “trio,” passing through a skeletal, pizzicato section, a passage in which first violin and cello, to a ticking-clock accompaniment, cannot quite get into phase followed by an increasingly frenetic episode of viola arpeggios and slightly out-of-synch violin lines and eventually just some quiet sighs. To fulfill the minuet form, the opening ghostly hymn tune returns but seems to lose its will and vaporizes into ascending, dying violin notes. The cellos is left alone, strumming, says the score, as though “recalling fragments of an old tune or story.”

Austrian composer and double bass virtuoso Johannes Sperger, born in 1750 in Feldsberg (now Valtice, Czech Republic, fifty miles north of Vienna), received his first musical instruction from the local church organist before heading to Vienna around 1768 to perfect his performance technique and study composition with the celebrated composer and theorist Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, a friend of Haydn and Mozart and a teacher of Beethoven. Sperger built an admirable reputation as a performer — “he displayed a rare mastery and purpose on his instrument, knowing how to impart character to the performance as a whole,” assessed one critic — and had several of his compositions performed in Vienna, including a bass concerto in which he was soloist.

Following the career path of many 18th-century musicians, Sperger held positions in the court musical establishments of Cardinal von Batthyani at Pressburg (1777–1783) and Count Ladislav von Erdődy at Fidisch (1783–1786), and may also have worked for Prince Esterházy when Haydn was his music director, though documentation for that job is not conclusive. Sperger was dismissed from his position at Fidisch when Count Erdödy died in 1786, and he supported himself mainly as a copyist in Vienna for the next three years, though he traveled widely during that time in Germany, Austria and Italy looking for work until landing a job in July 1789 as composer and bassist with the Duke of Mecklenburg at Ludwigslust, seventy miles east of Hamburg. Sperger was based there for the rest of his life, also making occasional tours to appear as composer and bassist in Lübeck, Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna and elsewhere.

In addition to his work as a performer, Sperger was a prolific composer, writing 45 symphonies, two dozen concertos (18 for bass), many chamber works, and a few keyboard pieces. Sperger composed at least four duos for viola and bass that show the lyricism, agility and rich sonorities of which these too-often-neglected instruments are capable. The opening movement of the Sonata in D major (M.C 1:108 in the 1990 catalog of Sperger’s works by Adolf Meier and Eitelfriedrich Thom) follows a form typical of the gestating sonata structure of the early Classical period: exposition with a songful first theme, second theme that reaches into the upper compass of the bass, and third theme in close harmonies; development mainly using the first theme; and recapitulation in which the first and second themes are implied rather than clearly stated, and the third theme returns intact.

Krzysztof Penderecki (pen-de-RET-skee), the most significant Polish composer of the late 20th century and one of the most inspired and influential musicians to emerge from Eastern Europe after World War II, enrolled at the University of Kraków when he was seventeen with the intention of studying humanities, but a year later he transferred to the Kraków Academy of Music as a composition student. Upon graduating from the Academy in 1958, he was appointed to the school’s faculty and soon began establishing an international reputation for his compositions.

In 1966, he went to Münster for the premiere of his St. Luke Passion, and his presence and music made such a strong impression in West Germany that he was asked to join the faculty of the Volkwäng Hochschule für Musik in Essen. Penderecki returned to Kraków in 1972 to become director of the Academy of Music; while guiding the school during the next fifteen years, he also held an extended residency at Yale University. He was active as a conductor in Europe and America beginning in 1972. Among Penderecki’s many distinctions were the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville, Order of the White Eagle (Poland’s highest honor), five Grammys and honorary doctorates from several European and American universities.

Penderecki said that Leaves of an Unwritten Diary, arranged for string quintet from his String Quartet No. 3, which was commissioned by a consortium led by Montclair State University in honor of the composer’s 75th birthday, was “a sentimental journey into long-abandoned landscapes.” The work plumbed deeply into Penderecki’s past. “When I was twelve,” he recalled, “my father bought a good instrument for me from a Soviet soldier for a bottle of raw spirits;” he wrote his first violin pieces soon thereafter. Penderecki also remembered his father materially in the Third Quartet by basing its closing section on a traditional Gypsy dance tune of the Hutsul people of the Ukrainian Carpathians, not far from where his father had grown up in southeastern Poland. “My father,” Penderecki said, “played that tune on the violin. He played it obsessively, each time slightly differently, coming up with all kinds of variations.... [In this work, this theme] grew so much that it nearly took control of my whole piece.”

Nicholas Tzavaras, cellist of the Shanghai Quartet, for whom the work was composed, wrote that Leaves of an Unwritten Diary is “in a single movement with strongly defined subsections. Starting with an almost grave introduction, a dark, screaming melody in the viola leads directly into a driven, brilliant vivace in G minor, which recurs throughout the piece. A beautiful waltz soon emerges, followed by a poignant and sweetly singing notturno, then back to the vivace pattern that Penderecki insisted we play ‘faster, faster.’ By the end of our work with the composer we could barely play all the notes in this furious tempo. As we increased the tempo, however, the excitement and intensity were slowly revealed.

“Towards the end of the work, a spectacular Gypsy melody appears, a theme that hadn’t been heard in any of the composer’s previous works. We asked Maestro Penderecki about this theme and he told us it’s a melody his father used to play on his violin when he was a child. The climax of this masterpiece soon comes, where all of the previously heard themes collide in a powerful moment that is full of intensity and drama. The end follows shortly after this: soft and introspective, almost walking off into the distance, with stopped harmonics played by the second violin echoing the Gypsy melody.”