About this work: Piano Quintet, for piano and violin, with violin, viola and violoncello (2004)
Published by Biscardi Music Press: No. B48-04-1
Piano Quintet was written in memory of my father. This work 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.
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
Piano Quintet 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.
Note: Recognition, for piano and violin with string orchestra (2004/2007), is an arrangement of Piano Quintet.