Opera Columbus
www.operacolumbus.
6 p.m. Saturday, Refectory Restaurant & Bistro, 1092 Bethel Road; 5 p.m. Sunday, Shadowbox Live Bistro, 503 S. Front St.
Saturday: $95, including dinner; Sunday: $10
In recent years, Caroline Shaw has broadened her musical palette. While she once wrote music for eight voices, she recently created a composition for 44 instrumentalists.
In 2012, Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” was featured on an inaugural album from Roomful of Teeth, an a cappella ensemble in which she sings. The next year, the work earned the composer a Pulitzer Prize for music, an award previously given to luminaries such as Aaron Copland, Morton Gould and Charles Ives.
In 2015, however, Shaw attempted her first foray into orchestral composition with “Lo.” After being co-commissioned by four classical-music organizations — the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra — the piece received its premiere in Cincinnati that year.
Under the baton of Music Director Rossen Milanov, the Columbus Symphony will perform “Lo” on Friday and Saturday in the Southern Theatre. Shaw — a violinist who wrote a part for herself in the work — will serve as soloist. (Works by Haydn and Beethoven, neither featuring Shaw, will also be performed by the symphony.)
A native of Greenville, North Carolina, Shaw came late to composing.
“I started violin when I was really, really young, and that’s what I did really rigorously for most of my life,” said Shaw, who earned degrees from Rice University in 2004 and Yale University in 2007. “I sort of taught myself to sing and to write music.”
Shaw, a New York resident Saturday $10 to $70 currently completing a doctorate at Princeton University, said that her earlier vocal works overlap with the more-ambitious “Lo.”
“I find myself writing vocally and chorally even when it’s with an orchestra, especially with the brass,” she said. “It’s just like a really interesting, bigger, slightly different playground than writing for the voice.”
This weekend’s concerts are the latest chapter in a collaboration between Shaw and Milanov: In 2009, before winning acclaim as a composer, Shaw began playing the violin with the Princeton Symphony led by Milanov. Her sudden success with “Partita for 8 Voices” took him by surprise.
“You don’t evaluate every single musician until they do something extraordinary, which was, in a way, like the moment when we realized that she had been the new Pulitzer Prize winner,” Milanov said.
Shaw, who no longer performs with the Princeton Symphony, enjoyed working with Milanov.
“When I first worked with him, when I was playing in the orchestra, I was blown away,” Shaw said. “He’s such a fantastic musician and so naturally musical.”
Last year, the Princeton Symphony performed “Lo,” which Milanov praises for incorporating multiple sections of the orchestra.
“It uses a relatively big orchestra with beautiful chorales that are happening in the brass ... with quite evocative writing for the string section that goes around (Shaw’s) solo line,” Milanov said. “Very nice patches of colors in the woodwinds.”
The 17-minute piece is divided into three movements, but Shaw said that they are intended to “blend together.”
The first movement, she said, opens with “clips of what sounds like older music ... something that sounds a little bit Sibelius, a little bit Prokofiev, little bit Bach, little bit Monteverdi, just sweeping by quickly before it launches into the main theme.”
The second movement is “a lot more plaintive and very simple for the orchestra,” she said.
And the third movement is a “whirlwind of a mix of different styles all at once.”
Shaw’s part for solo violin has elements of improvisation.
“Only 10 percent is improvised; 90 percent is pretty planned-out, but I like the looseness of it,” she said, adding that she is the only violinist so far to have played the part.
“Somebody asked about it recently, and I just haven’t gotten around to writing down the part,” Shaw said. “I enjoy getting to meet orchestras and meet orchestra players through this piece.”
“#UncleJohn” — the company’s updated interpretation of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” — will enter its second weekend of performances. Shows will continue at several venues through Nov. 17.