Recognition
Chester Biscardi
About this work:
Recognition, for piano and violin with string orchestra (2004/2007)
Published by Biscardi Music Press: No. B48-07-2
Recognition is an arrangement of Piano Quintet, which was written in memory of my father. The quintet version was begun during the summer of 2002 while I was in residence at Copland House, Cortlandt Manor, New York, as a recipient of the Aaron Copland Award, and was completed during a residency at The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, in the fall of 2004. This arrangement for soloists with string orchestra was made in the spring of 2007 in New York City.
I am that father your boyhood lacked
and suffered pain for lack of. I am he.
from Book Sixteen: Father and Son, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Recognition is based on musical sketches dating back to 1987. These ideas underwent several transformations - a work for orchestra, a ballet, an act of an opera, and a poem - before I settled on the chamber version inspired by having heard a performance of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-Flat Major (Op. 44). These images also interweave with musical borrowings from several of my earlier works, including Mestiere, for piano (1979), Trasumanar, for twelve percussionists and piano (1980), Piano Concerto (1983), Recovering, for voice and piano (2000), and In Time’s Unfolding, for piano (2000), all of which in one way or another explore the passage of time, loss, recovery, and transcendence.
I did rely on a rather loose, narrative structure concerning The Odyssey to a certain extent, and without revealing too much I can point out that – as seen in the subtitle of the work, “for piano and violin with string orchestra” – the piano may be interpreted as “Odysseus” and the violin as “Telemakhos”, Odysseus’s son. And the opening web-like music suggests the goddess Athena as she pulls Telemakhos out of his daydreams and anger and sets him on a hero’s path of action.
Year composed: 2007
Duration: 00:15:00
Ensemble type: Orchestra:String Orchestra with Soloist(s)
Instrumentation: ,1 Piano soloist(s), 1 Strings (General), ,1 Violin soloist(s)