Admission : $35 at the door, $25 via presale online. (Other discounts available via online link sales)
Tickets:
https://www.choralartsnw.org/season/#May2024
Description:
Malhaar: A Requiem for Water
Choral Arts Northwest, Timothy Westerhaus, Artistic Director
Reena Esmail, Composer-in-Residence
Saturday, May 11, 2024, 7:30 PM
Bastyr University Chapel@14500 Juanita Dr NE, Kenmore, WA 98028
Sunday, May 12, 2024, 3 PM
Bellevue High School PAC, 10416 Wolverine Way, Bellevue, WA 98004
Highlights include:
Northwest premiere of Malhaar: A Requiem for Water
Workshops/concerts with Reena Esmail, CANW's 2024 Composer-in-Residence and rising star in the choral community
Saili Oak, Hindustani vocalist
Ravi Albright, tabla
Andrew Angell, percussion
Special Guests: Columbia Choirs Cantabile, Katrina Turman, director; Bothell High School Chamber Choir, Mikaela Rink, director; Bellevue High School Concert Choir, Andrew Jacobson, director; Newport High School Concert Choir, Nancy Fisher, director
CANW presents the PNW premiere of Los Angeles-based composer, Reena Esmail's Malhaar: A Requiem for Water. A rising star in the choral world, Reena Esmail joins CANW for a two-day residency, helping us craft Malhaar but also leading masterclasses on her music with choirs from Bellevue HS and Bothell HS choirs, and Cantabile from the Columbia Choirs.
For our concert, we share the stage with our high school and community partners, following their opening performances with Ms. Esmail's stunning new work, Malhaar.
From the Composer (about Malhaar):
"In Hindustani music, Malhaar refers to a family of raags that beckon rain. As the legend goes, the greatest musicians could cause a downpour from even the most severely parched skies by the power of their song.
This is the inspiration for Malhaar: A Requiem for Water. As the drought worsened in Southern California, I yearned for a way to process the rising panic. The work intertwines texts from the traditional Latin Requiem mass alongside the work of Wendell Berry and William O'Daly, along with interspersed Hindi. It traces a trajectory of beauty and awe of water, the fear and devastation around its loss, an answered plea of atonement, and eventually a promise of a new cycle of life, as the water returns to the skies.
This is a hopeful requiem. While the collective loss has been so tremendous, we can still hold out hope that if we change our relationship to the earth, we might beckon the rain back."
- Reena Esmail
Tickets at https://www.choralartsnw.org/season/#May2024
About Artist:
Reena Esmail, composer
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces.
Esmail's life and music was profiled on Season 3 of PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, as well as Frame of Mind, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Esmail divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral work. She has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, BRUITS by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider. Many of her choral works are published by Oxford University Press.
Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale's 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and was Seattle Symphony's 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. She also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.
Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM'05) and the Yale School of Music (MM'11, MMA'14, DMA'18). Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.
Esmail was Composer-in-Residence for Street Symphony (2016-18) and is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.
She currently resides in her hometown of Los Angeles, California.
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