Out Friday: Terra Infirma by Reena Esmail - Harp & Percussion Concerto in Response to LA Wildfires - Featuring Yolanda Kondonassis
New Album Terra Infirma Out on CD May 15
Features GRAMMY®-Nominated Harpist Yolanda Kondonassis
In New Concerto for Harp & Percussion by Reena Esmail
Altadena-Based Composer Wrote Piece in Response to LA Wildfires
Yolanda Kondonassis | Reena Esmail | Azica Records
Terra Infirma, the new Azica album from GRAMMY®-nominated harpist Yolanda Kondonassis, will be released on CD on May 15. Released digitally shortly before Earth Day, Terra Infirma features world premiere recordings of major new works by acclaimed composer Reena Esmail, including the titular concerto for harp and percussion (with Kondonassis as soloist on both instruments), as well as Sandhiprakash for violin and harp, and Earth Speaks: Curiosity for chorus and solo harp. In addition to Kondonassis, the album includes violinist Vijay Gupta, the Interlochen Center for the Arts Orchestra and Chorus, conductor Andrew Grams, and choral director Carter Smith.
Reena Esmail’s new harp and percussion concerto Terra Infirma was directly informed by the composer’s experience living in Altadena, CA during the catastrophic fires of January 2025. Esmail, who is Indian-American, also drew on her extensive studies of Hindustani music in composing the piece. Her compositional voice is at once arresting, lyrical, haunting, and fierce. She writes in the liner notes, “Though the idea had been set in motion four years earlier, the timing of its creation was uncanny. I began writing this concerto in January 2025, a few days before wildfire ravaged my neighborhood of Altadena, CA. The material for immolation came to me as I walked the hills of Los Angeles while we were evacuated. The piece draws on the ancient Hindustani raags of Deepak, which evokes fire, and Megh, which extinguishes it through rain.” Kondonassis, known for “a range of colour that’s breathtaking,” (Gramophone), brings the work to life with colorful authenticity.
Terra Infirma reflects not only the environmental passion and advocacy of both artists, but also their inspiration to innovate and expand the concerto form. In this bold new work, with a title taken from a poem by Robert Walters (commissioned by Kondonassis through her environmental awareness non-profit organization Earth at Heart), the harp symbolizes the protagonist Earth, both fragile and powerful. The towering instrument is moved choreographically by Kondonassis across the stage as she journeys through various arrays of suspended percussion. Esmail describes the work as “part virtuoso concerto, part performance art, and part theater.”
Says Esmail, “Terra Infirma sits somewhere between a harp/percussion concerto and a monodrama – Yolanda leads us through the trajectory of a wildfire, starting with the eerie moments before the first spark, and ending with the hope of new growth. The work explores our human relationship to fire – a force that can be at once devastating and illuminating. It has been a dream to work so closely with Yolanda, who has reinvented the role of the harp over and over again throughout her career. We have built the DNA of this piece together over so many years – experimenting in percussion studios, mapping stage plots, pushing our imaginations to the limit. I am so excited to share this work with the world.”
Kondonassis says, “The personal and musical resonance that I feel with Reena has resulted in a work that’s deeply personal, uniquely colorful, and ground-breaking in so many ways. The harp is a highly visual instrument, and Terra Infirma utilizes that element to the fullest. In this work, the harp is actually a character in the musical drama onstage, and that gives me the chance to portray an enormous range of artistic emotion.”
She adds, “This album came at a time of reinvention in my personal and professional life. I recently lost my father, who was my rock, and that void just knocked me over. I also made the difficult decision to leave my teaching homes at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Oberlin Conservatory, and am now opening a new chapter on the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It’s been a time of complicated upheaval, but this has led me to new clarity. It's become very clear to me that in the next phase of my career, I want to create and perform art that is closely tied to our human experience and to our complex relationship with the planet that is our only home. This album truly encapsulates those values, and its release feels like a rebirth for me. Sharing this work with the world is an honor and a joy.”
The album also includes Esmail’s works Sandhiprakash (originally written for solo cello in 2022, reimagined for violin and harp for this project) and Earth Speaks: Curiosity (originally written in 2014 for chorus and solo piano, revised for chorus and solo harp). Esmail writes, “Sandhiprakash, meaning ‘the joining of light’, is the term for a particular set of Hindustani raags that are performed at the moments of sunrise and sunset. This piece focuses on the sunrise raags, Bhairav, Ahir Bhairav and Vibhas. Quite different from the sonorities that evoke dawn in Western music, these melodies are darker and more mysterious.” Earth Speaks: Curiosity uses as its texts the list of stops that the rover Curiosity made on Mars in 2011 – many of them named from the places worldwide where the scientists involved conducted their research – as well as haikus which were submitted to an online competition to commemorate the launch.
Each piece on the album concerns our relationship to the environment – an ongoing theme in both Kondonassis’s and Esmail’s work. Kondonassis’s most recent album is FIVE MINUTES for Earth from 2022, which features pieces (including one by Esmail) commissioned through her non-profit Earth at Heart. Esmail often uses her work as a composer and performer to support environmental advocacy, particularly with her compositions Earth Speaks and Malhaar: A Requiem for Water. The new album forms the heart of The Terra Infirma Project, a multi-year initiative of the Interlochen Center for the Arts.
Yolanda Kondonassis: www.yolandaharp.com/about
Reena Esmail: www.reenaesmail.com/bio
Vijay Gupta: vijaygupta.com
Andrew Grams: andrewgrams.com
Carter Smith: interlochen.org/person/carter-smith
Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra: interlochen.org/music/academy/music-ensembles