For the first time, Caroline Shaw, a world-renowned American singer and composer, is coming to Lithuania. On 5 December this year, an exclusive concert with the renowned New York percussion group Sō Percussion will take place in the newly renovated LVSO Concert Hall.

Caroline Shaw is a world-renowned vocal artist and composer. Her concerts are hugely popular with audiences around the world, and her work has received solid acclaim. At the age of just 30, Caroline Shaw won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Music (2013), making her the youngest recipient of the award. She has even won several Grammy Awards. She has also received an honorary doctorate from Yale University. Caroline Shaw has performed as a composer and performer in some of the world's most renowned concert halls, including New York's Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles's Walt Disney Hall, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, London's Barbican Center, Seattle's Benaroya Hall, and others. Her music has been performed at Big Ears, Bang on a Can Marathon, Tanglewood, Aspen, Edinburgh and many other world-renowned festivals.

Caroline Shaw is a musician who navigates between different roles, genres and media, striving to convey a world of sound that has never been heard before, but has always existed. She often collaborates with other artists as producer, composer, vocalist and violinist. The breadth of Shaw's work is well illustrated by her recent projects, including the soundtracks for the TV series Fleishman is in Trouble (FX/Hulu) and Josephine Decker's musical The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple), the music for the National Theatre production of The Crucible (directed by Lyndsey Turner), the score for Microfictions Vol. 3 premiered with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral soundtrack for Wu Tsang's silent film Moby Dick, albums with Nonesuch (Evergreen, Rectangles and Circumstance), music for Helen Simoneau's dance piece Delicate Power, and more.

A talented and prolific composer, she has written more than 100 works for world-renowned artists over the past decade, including Anne Sofie von Otter, Davóne Tines, Yo Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Ariadne Greif, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Philharmonia Baroque, Aizuri, Dover, Calidore, Miro, Brooklyn Rider Quartets, The Crossing Vocal Ensemble, I Giardini, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Brooklyn Youth Chorus. She has also contributed to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid and Nas.

This concert in Vilnius will feature Caroline Shaw's songs from her and Sō Percussion's collaborative albums Rectangles and Circumstance (2024) and Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (2021). The songs on the latter album were born from a collaborative process in the recording studio and the lyrics are inspired by a wide range of artistic interests: the work of the writer James Joyce, a poem by Anne Carson, the Bible, the American folk tune I'll Fly Away, the music of the band ABBA, and more. Meanwhile, Rectangles and Circumstance is inspired by the poetry of 19th century composers Christina Rosetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein and William Blake. Caroline Shaw is a guest composer at this year's Gaida Festival, where, in addition to many of her songs performed at this concert, the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra will perform another of her works, Entr'acte, on 25 October with violin virtuoso and conductor Hugo Ticciati.

Caroline Shaw is performing with one of the most famous percussion bands in the world - Sō Percussion. This New York collective is already familiar to Vilnius audiences - the group performed at the Gaida Festival a few years ago to great acclaim. Sō Percussion has recently performed at venues such as New York's Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Hamburg's Elbe Philharmonic, Barcelona's Palau de la Musica Catalana, and at London's Barbican Centre, Big Ears, Long Play, Sound Unbound, Bang on a Can Marathon, and other festivals. Critics say that Sō Percussion has redefined 21st century music through a "thrilling combination of precision and anarchy, rigor and madness" (The New Yorker), and has revitalised a vibrant percussion repertoire. The group has collaborated with composers such as David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Steve Reich, Paul Lansky, Dan Trueman and many others.