PIANO CONCERTO
Year of composition: 2020
Instrumentation: piano and orchestra
Duration: 24′
Movements: I. Reflections, II. Echoes, III. Rainbows
Commissioned by Esprit Orchestra, with financial support from Chantal Perrot
Premiere: Christopher Goddard with Esprit Orchestra, Alex Pauk dir.
Koerner Hall, Toronto
April 3, 2022
PROGRAMME NOTE
In the text Posterior Analytics Aristotle uses his logic of analogy to describe what he sees as the changeable contents of fixed categories. One example he offers is a likeness of relation in reflections, echoes, and rainbows, which are described as specifically different events that share a common generic cause, namely repercussion. Though we now know rainbows to be caused by refraction, our modern understanding of reflections and echoes affirms, in the domains of light and sound respectively, his observation. When I encountered this beautiful passage it prompted in me a musical analogy to the rebounding of a piano’s action when hammer strikes string. The metaphor – repercussion; bouncing; impact – came to dominate my early thinking towards the concerto, as I contemplated how Aristotle’s phenomena might inspire a creative utterance that evokes the (flawed) unity seen in them by the philosopher.
The near symmetry of a pianist’s hands serves as generating idea for Reflections (mvt. I). I make this physical quality musically manifest in the score by casting much of the material in distorted mirror images of itself on the registral/spatial continuum. A more poetic reckoning of the title also animates this music, which flickers with memories of the concerto tradition and of my own long personal history with the instrument. Echoes (mvt. II) emerges out of the first movement almost without pause and employs the ‘reflections’ concept in a temporal sense: the piano’s resonance becomes a focal point as musical fragments are sounded by the soloist and then reheard in the orchestra in altered timbre after their initial ringing. Functioning as a quasi-epilogue, Rainbows (mvt. III) recapitulates elements of the earlier movements in one prolonged falling gesture. Here the bending of light is captured musically by cascading waves of glissandi in the piano, set against string glissandi that seem to illuminate the soloist from behind. The work ends in an enigmatic duet with the celli that recalls the warped symmetry of the opening movement.