World Premiere: World Premiere
Most Recent HSO Performance: World Premiere
Instrumentation: guitar and cello duet, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, horn, trumpet, timpani, percussion, harp, strings
Duration: 20’

Anahata, Concerto for Guitar, Cello Orchestra (2023)
WORLD PREMIERE

Composer, pianist, vocalist and educator Clarice Assad, daughter of renowned guitarist Sérgio Assad, was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1978 and has performed professionally since the age of seven. She studied piano, jazz and traditional Brazilian styles with Sheila Zagury and Leandro Braga, and continued her education with Natalie Fortin in Paris and at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, Roosevelt University in Chicago, and University of Michigan; her composition teachers include Ilya Levinson, Stacy Garrop, Osvaldo Golijov, Michael Daugherty, Evan Chambers and Claude Baker. Among Assad’s many honors are residencies with the Albany Symphony, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, MacDowell Colony and Moab Music Festival, Aaron Copland Award, Gould Young Composer Award, Samuel Ostrowsky Humanities Award, several ASCAP awards in composition, Meet the Composer’s Van Lier Fellowship and McKnight Visiting Composer Fellowship. In 2009, her Danças Nativas for guitar quartet was nominated for the Latin Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition, and her album Archetypes, performed with her father and Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion, received 2022 Grammy nominations for the Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

Clarice Assad’s music, which blends classical and jazz elements subtly infused with the Latin rhythms of her native Brazil, has been commissioned and performed by such leading artists and organizations as Carnegie Hall, Philadelphia Orchestra, Louisville Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Chattanooga Symphony, Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo, New Century Chamber Orchestra, violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Iwao Furusawa, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, soprano Melody Moore, pop singer Insooni, guitarist Denis Sungho, mandolinist Mike Marshall, LA Guitar Quartet, Turtle Island String Quartet and Concordia Chamber Players, and recorded on the Sony Classical, Universal Music, NSS Music, Nonesuch, Chandos, Telarc and Rob Digital labels. As a pianist and vocalist, Clarice Assad has received acclaim for her performances of both her original compositions and her arrangements and performances of popular Brazilian songs and jazz standards. She has appeared throughout her native Brazil, the United States and Europe at such distinguished venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Chicago, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in California, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Le Casino de Paris and Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Clarice Assad has also developed a pioneering music workshop called VOXPlorations, which explores new ways to create, teach and understand music for both musicians and non-musicians.

“Anahata, ‘unhurt’ or ‘unstricken’ in Sanskrit, refers to the core heart chakra [a center of spiritual power in the human body] in yogic ideas,” Assad wrote of her Concerto for Guitar and Cello. “Anahata is a psychic hub governing our ability for kindness, calmness and deep human closeness. As cellist Laura Metcalf and guitarist Rupert Boyd, for whom the work was written, first imagined this piece with me, ‘love’ emerged as our luminous inspiration, reflecting their connected lives as artistic and romantic partners.

“This concerto for cello and classical guitar stands as a musical reflection on the complex nature of love. Its three movements explore love’s opposites, interweaving tense passages evoking love’s wounds with melodious harmonies voicing its most precious dreams. It traces an abstract romantic arc without literal storytelling. Anahata’s central theme indirectly resonates with the solo duo’s creative chemistry and personal bond. It merges with echoes from my own memories, threads of influence from my childhood in Brazil and adolescence in France. These personal ancestral details form this fabric of sound.

“Yet beyond the inspiring backstory, at its essence Anahata translates love’s vibrant, unblocked flow into music spanning from heartache to delight. Just as ancient maps of yoga chart the heart chakra as a fountain of vitality infusing existence, this work seeks to give voice and motion to the spectrum of loving emotions that connects us across barriers through realms of understanding deeply sensed but rarely put into words.

“The Color Green opens the work and evokes the chakra of the musical voyage that follows.

“Desert Roses is about an ‘ancient’ courtship, two people falling in love in a distant past — imagine an old, dusty, faded sepia photograph of a couple that is no longer among us.

“Full Circle Reel conveys the sense of the cycle from birth to an eventual future with many references — to reels of film that hold memories, to folk dance reels that bring communities together across generations, or to the constant, unsteady motion to find balance across life’s trajectory.”

©2023 Dr. Richard E. Rodda