Musica Viva NY To Perform Works by Reena Esmail and J.S. Bach In December

Musica Viva NY, kickstarts the holiday season with THIS LOVE BETWEEN US, a one-night only concert capturing the awe and magnificence of our humanity on Sunday, December 8, 2024, at 5:00 p.m., at Manhattan's All Souls NYC.

Led by the choir's intrepid Artistic Director/Conductor Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, Musica Viva NY will be joined by a baroque orchestra, sitar and tabla players, and guest vocalists.  

Reena Esmail's beautiful This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity and Bach's brilliant Magnificat written for Christmas Day make an interesting pairing, juxtaposing the familiar and the unfamiliar, the past and the present, and a young Indian-American composer and a venerated German master. 

Celebrating a decade at the helm, Alejandro curates a program of works that are personally meaningful to him while showcasing the diversity that has been a hallmark of Musica Viva NY for the past 10 years. “Pairing Bach with a modern-day female composer of color is Musica Viva NY's way of making classical music as relevant as possible,” explains Alejandro. “We hope to create a space in which audience members can find themselves reflected in the music they hear.”

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail (b. 1983) is known for fusing elements of both Hindustani and classical Western music into sweeping, passionate compositions. Drawing on her South Asian roots, Esmail—who has worked with the Kronos Quartet, Albany Symphony, and Chicago Sinfonietta, among others—creates choral and symphonic pieces that have been hailed as compelling, exhilarating, memorable, and altogether original. Her Western-style harmonic structures are heard in This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity, her 2016 choral work that Opera News described as “a powerful work of music.” In seven movements Esmail juxtaposes the words of seven major religious traditions of India (Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Jainism and Islam), and specifically their respective approaches to the topic of unity, pulled straight from canonical religious writings or poems and set simultaneously in English and in their original languages. Musically, each movement unites Indian and Western classical styles, running the continuum from the Christian movement, which is rooted firmly in a baroque style, to the Zoroastrian movement, which is a Hindustani vilambit bandish. Esmail expounds in her program notes: “Even more than uniting musical practices, this piece unites people from two different musical traditions: a sitar and tabla join the choir and baroque orchestra. Each of the musicians is asked to keep one hand firmly rooted in their own tradition and training, while reaching the other hand outward to greet another musical culture.”

Through the course of almost half a century, J.S. Bach wrote sacred music for virtually every kind of occasion his faith called for. And among the hundreds of cantatas, the Passions, the masses, and the oratorios, Magnificat was Bach's most elaborate sacred work to date. 

The Magnificat is the first large choral work that Bach composed after his appointment in Leipzig in the spring of 1723. The text comes from the “Song of Mary,” a rich statement of purpose and faith from the Gospel of Luke, and is about the visit made by Mary to her cousin Elisabeth, who was also pregnant. It was first performed on Christmas Day 1723. Musica Viva NY performs Bach's revised version from 1733 featuring transverse flutes and two oboes.

About Reena Esmail (composer + vocalist)

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 been 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 has been in residence with Tanglewood Music Center (co-Curator – 2023) and Spoleto Festival (Chamber Music Composer-in-Residence – 2024). 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. ReenaEsmail.com

About Musica Viva NY

Musica Viva NY is a non-profit arts organization that was established nearly 50 years ago. Its mission is to bring world-class music to a wide community through an annual concert series, an active community engagement program, and an ambitious artistic vision.

Under the baton of Artistic Director Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez since 2015, Musica Viva NY strives to offer joy, solace and renewal in a complex world by presenting new compositions and classic masterworks in transformative interpretations that ennoble the human spirit.

Musica Viva NY's superb chamber choir and world class collaborating instrumentalists make their concert home at Manhattan's historic All Souls NYC. They regularly combine their  presentation of the classical repertoire with less widely known works, as part of their commitment to perform the works of living American composers, women composers and composers of color, including works that address social, racial or environmental issues. Composers whose works have been featured in recent Musica Viva NY performances include Florence Price, Alexandra T Bryant, Steve Reich, Frank Ticheli, Missy Mazzoli, Alice Walker, Joel Thompson and Jesse Montgomery.

Musica Viva NY has commissioned and premiered numerous works by contemporary composers including Bora Yoon, Seymour Bernstein, Elena Ruehr, Joseph Turrin, Bruce Saylor, Jean-Louis Petit, Eugenio Toussaint, Gilda Lyons, Richard Einhorn, Trent Johnson and Trevor Weston.

Beyond high-quality concert performances, Musica Viva NY also serves the communities of New York City through a growing variety of rich community engagement programs. Currently, Musica Viva NY partners with New York city public schools, extracurricular youth ensembles, New York Public Library branches and the All Souls' Monday Night Hospitality dinner program, offering free performances, artist clinics, interactive workshops, and more. Musica Viva NY has nurtured young artists throughout its half century of existence. Great musicians who have been Musica Viva NY singers and soloists include the Metropolitan Opera stars Samuel Ramey and Renée Fleming, and Broadway's Aladdin, Michael Maliakel.

The organization was founded as an annual concert series in 1977 by Walter Klauss, who directed the group for 38 years, and adopted the name “Musica Viva” in 1985. Under Walter Klauss' baton the choir toured in Paris (2004), Germany and Czechoslovakia (2006) and Italy (2012). 

Ticketing + Program Information:

Sunday, December 8, 2024, at 5:00 p.m. (pre-concert talk at 4:00 p.m.)
All Souls NYC, 1157 Lexington Avenue, New York City, Subways: 6 to 77th St or 4/5/6 to 86th St
Tickets: $50 ($30 for students) are available from MusicaViva.org. 

Performers: 

Musica Viva NY choir

Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, artistic director and conductor
TBA, guest vocalists
TBA, sitar and tabla
Baroque orchestra 

Program: 

This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity (2016) by Reena Esmail 
Magnificat BWV 243 (1723) by J.S. Bach