Indian sweets and tea tasting will be available during and after the concert! Please enjoy.
No applause is required during the concert - after the final piece, we welcome audience members to share their impressions of the music.
PROGRAM
Darshan for solo violin - Reena Esmail
I. Bihag (2021)
III. Charukeshi (2019)
Varsha for solo cello (2019) - Reena Esmail
In Memoriam Ravi Shankar for solo violin (2012) - Katherine Hoover
In Whose Mouth the Stars for violin, viola and cello (2019) - Akshaya Avril Tucker
Pareeksha for violin and cello (2021)
world pre-premiere; commissioned by Magdalena Sas for the Third Coast Chamber Collective
Anusvara for solo cello (2008) - Shirish Korde
NOTES ON THE MUSIC
Darshan - Reena Esmail
Darshan means 'vision' in Sanskrit: a mystical vision of the divine, or seeing one another in the world. Darshan is a five-movement Partita based on a different Hindustani raag.
[...] The opening movement, set in the sweet, melodious raag Bihag, is associated with the deepest, darkest night. This movement is a dream, a beginning in wisps of unreal imagination - the violin playing in stratospheric colors. Slowly, the raga is introduced as the violin descends into the realm of the real, eventually reaching the "bandish" (or "tune"), played on the lowest string with a drone - commonly played by the tanpura instrument in Hindustani tradition.
That drone turns into a pulsating, throbbing triplet, accompanying the bandish throughout the rest of the movement, reaching ecstasy, before climbing back to the heavens.
The movement Charukeshi, in Raag Charukeshi, is the first movement of five, which will be written over a span of five years. It explores grief, in its many facets and forms.
Varsha - Reena Esmail
This piece, Varsha, serves as an interlude between Sonata V (Sitio – “I Thirst”) and Sonata VI (Consummatum Est – “It is finished”) of Haydn’s Seven Last Words. The combination of Hindustani raags used in this piece are from the Malhaar family, which are sung to beckon rain.
I imagined an interlude between these two sonatas: Christ thirsts. Rain comes from the distance (Megh Malhaar). There is a downpour around him (Miyan ki Malhaar), but he grows slowly weaker. His next words make clear that even the rain is not enough: his thirst is of another sort, which cannot be quenched by water. And so, it is finished.
In Memoriam Ravi Shankar - Katherine Hoover (2012)
In the late 1960's, Ravi Shankar came to America with his sitar, and brought us the exotic sounds of Indian Classical Music. He played with a trio, performing long, Improvised ragas based on scale patterns and rhythms strange to our cars. It was fascinating, strange, and quite wonderful. I was particularly struck by the rhythms, which, Instead of regular bars of 3 or 4 beats, proceed by combining small contrasting units, such as 3/2/3/3/2. These are called “additive rhythms”. To me they were “addictive” rhythms, and I have used them many times. "In Memoriam" was written shortly after Ravi Shankar's death, in 2012. It has a slow Introductory section, followed by a dance-like one. The slower material returns, moves into a melody, accompanied by pizzicato, and then returns to the faster, dance material. Both of these faster sections are based on additive rhythms.
In Whose Mouth the Stars - Akshaya Avril Tucker
The story goes that when Krishna, the legendary incarnation of Lord Vishnu, was a child, he once was caught eating sand. Concerned, his mother Yashoda scolded him and pried his mouth open.There, instead of dirt, she beheld the entire universe and beyond, with all its galaxies, with every element of the earth, the weather, the human mind and its senses, her own village and she herself. This piece was inspired by that fascinating moment, told in the Bhagavata Purana.
I imagined it through in different melodic placements of Raag Charukeshi -- a raag that holds longing, tension, transcendence -- with help from the wonderful variety of timbres and ranges that string instruments produce. My goal in retelling this story, sonically, involved the manipulation of sound "perspective," the extremes of near and far -- holding both illusion and imagination. I wanted to play that narrative game, Krishna's lila, showing how small our conflicts really are, in the grand scheme of the Universe: even smaller than sand.
Pareeksha - Asha Srinivasan
With the current trials and tribulations that we are living through, I felt a strong urge to write an angry, intense piece. The Hindi word Pareeksha aptly captures the feeling of being tested by the political, environmental, and health challenges we face. As with much of my music, this piece draws from Indian ragas for source material. It is also heavily inspired by the spirited and driving rhythmic patterns found in Carnatic music (South Indian classical style). Although there is no specific narrative, the piece moves through emotions of anger, frustration, yearning, melancholy, restlessness, aggression, and oppression. Even so, there are moments of beauty and stillness, and at the very end, a sense of defeat leads to an unsettled peace.
Anusvara - Shirish Korde
Anusvara literally means "after sound" in Sanskrit, and it is described by the composer as a "sonic meditation" influenced by concepts of sound found in several of the Upanishads, ancient Hindu texts. The piece is based on raag Rohini. Slowly unfolding melodic arches are interrupted by rhythmic sections reminiscent of the ancient Hindustani Dhrupad nom tom alap style (this is where the excerpt in this video begins). The instruments play interweaving independent pulsations to underpin the voice in these sections.