Committed to equitable, collaborative musical spaces, Indian-American composer Reena Esmail moves fluidly between the traditions of Indian and Western classical music. Her work is shaped by deep listening, cultural exchange, and a belief in music as a shared human practice—an approach reflected in features on PBS’s Great Performances: Now Hear This and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s podcast Frame of Mind. Writing with equal ease for orchestral, chamber, and choral forces, Esmail has collaborated with a wide range of ensembles and artists, and her music appears on several Grammy-nominated recordings. After training at The Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music, she received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India, an experience that continues to inform her creative voice. Her work has been recognized with major awards from organizations including United States Artists, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.

It’s an incredible honor to write for Gil and Orli Shaham, who have inspired me since I was very young. I associate Gil with Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, which is one of my favorites, and Orli plays Mozart beautifully. Both of these composers write with transparent, flexible luminosity, and I wanted to bring that to my Double Concerto. But my primary inspiration comes from two images. The first is the cover of their 1997 recording, “Dvořák for Two.” My father had a monthly classical recording subscription, and we would pick out CDs together. I was mesmerized by the picture of Gil and Orli on two chairs, an open door with light pouring through in between them. That’s how I think of them, bright, scintillating, and radiant. The other image came to me when I began composing. A person gazes at the sky watching a plane weaving in and out of massive clouds, some cumulus, some nimbus. The plane looks so tiny in comparison, yet the clouds are only vapor, while the solid aircraft is safely transporting passengers to their destination. It’s an epic idea: the comfort that comes with knowing that something barely visible is so tangible and present.  

Like a traditional concerto, this Double Concerto is in three movements. All gesture to the Western classical tradition, but are rooted in Hindustani music. I started with the final movement, a fast, wild, moving thing based on three ragas: Hindol, Malkauns, and Megh. They differ by only one note, but that note is the tonic, the fundamental tone. The harmonies pivot around something that is constantly changing, creating a feeling of unpredictability. My image of a plane emerging from clouds is the subject of the second movement, which is based on Pratiksha, a raga that sounds both major and minor. The solo instruments are the plane, intermittently audible at first and then uniting in a strong, grounded melody before floating away. The first movement is highly experimental. To me, opening movements in Western classical music feel regimented, so I played with the idea of the cadenza, the least structured element. The opening is an alap in the raga Puriya Dhanashree: not totally unmetered, but with a sense of suspended time. A bold primary theme in the raga Bhimpalas emerges, but the countermelodies are actually cadenzas, three in total. In each, the violin and piano jet off, dwelling in their own space before reuniting in the main melody.  -Reena Esmail