Mahlaar: A Requiem for Water
Reena Esmail
Yale Choral Artists (Jeffrey Douma, conductor)
Saili Oak, Hindustani vocalist
Rohit Panchakshari, tabla
Michael Yeung, percussion
Sarah Yanovitch Vitale, soprano
Yiran Zhao, soprano
Noah Horn, tenor
Program note:
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 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.
0:00 I. Holy Water
5:43 II. Requiem Aeternam
12:14 III. Skeptical Bell
15:51 Interlude: Sakhi Neer Bharan
21:26 IV. Lacrimosa
27:31 Interlude: Sakhi Neer Bharan II
30:25 V. Agnus Dei
36:34 VI. Questions for God
39:14 VII. The Dream of the Waterfall/In Paradisum