E U R Y D I C E (2024)

For Piano Solo

Duration ca. 8:30

PROGRAM NOTES

E U R Y D I C E was composed for the outstanding pianist Vicky Chow. The title of this work comes from Greek myth: Eurydice was, of course, Orpheus’s wife and the goal of his ill-fated rescue mission to the underworld. However, the piece was also strongly influenced by Thomas Hardy’s 1914 poem The Voice:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

Like Orpheus, the protagonist of Hardy’s poem has lost their beloved, and they imagine that they can hear her voice echoing towards them over the heath. This music, consequently, consists of a series of echoing events, which become increasingly insistent before exploding into a cascade of shimmering emotional release.

Commissioned by Vicky Chow and ICEBERG New Music. Premiered by Vicky Chow at the Cell Theatre, New York, NY (May 2025).

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