"The cloudburst is a ceremony, a celebration of the unleashed kinetic energy in all things." These are the words of Eric Whitacre as he describes one of his earliest choral pieces, Cloudburst. The commission for the piece came from Jocelyn Jensen, who had recently given a performance of Whitacre's very first composition, Go, lovely rose. As the composer described it, the request from this dynamic choral conductor coincided with a gift to him of Octavio Paz's richly sensual poetry (Whitacre would go on to compose several luscious choral works based on the words of Paz). The final coincidence in the genesis of Whitacre's Cloudburst was his personal experience around the same time of a "breathtaking" cloudburst in the desert. He settled on Paz's poem of that title, and set out to compose a similarly breathtaking work for choir.

Whitacre first takes his listeners through a richly textured setting of the complete Octavio Paz poem. The opening moments are an invocation to "la iluvia," the rain, with a torrent of unmetered patter on three images of water (completely different to Whitacre's setting of the same images in the love song Water night!). There follows a somewhat disjunct passage setting Paz's esoteric coloration of the natural world in its parched state, with blue suns, green whirlwinds, and pomegranate stars, and an achingly unfulfilled passage directly asking the "burnt earth" if there is no water, only blood and dust. Paz's final stanza resembles a magical invocation to rain, asking us to dream of rivers (once again featuring the unleashed flow of unmetered music), sing of growing plants (with music sending forth literal musical shoots as chords build), and a climax as we remember the fluids in blood, tides, earth, and body together.

At that point of primal remembrance, the rain truly awakens. The choir first breathes deeply (and loudly) as a hint of wind. The refreshment of the breeze arrives in untexted choral vowels and the sound of chimes (wind chimes?), as Whitacre brings in percussion and piano accompaniment. Crashes of thunder sound with pieces of tin and percussion. All of the choir then brings the sound of the actual rain bursting forth, via the sudden onset of unregulated finger-snapping, with soaring chords. The cloudburst is terrifying in its density, but also completely transient: mere seconds after its primordial cataracts have drenched the parched earth, the choir is but singing echoes, thunder is distant, and a scant drops of precious rain persist.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi