Piano Trio no. 1 (2025)
ca. 8 minutes
World premiere by Trio Zimbalist on October 17, 2025 at Newport Classical
Chamber music has always had a remarkable social element to it – many works were solely written to play with friends. One can imagine the conviviality in a chamber reading at the Schumanns with Brahms and Joachim; or the mad scenes of Beethoven sight-reading a freshly-inked Kreutzer Sonata at its premiere, with violinist George Bridgetower reading over his shoulder as there wasn’t enough time to prepare a violin part (true story!).
In this spirit of friendship, my Piano Trio is a bespoke work for Trio Zimbalist, a group I’ve had the great pleasure to co-found with two friends. However, unlike Bridgetower, they get to play from finished parts.
The piece is built around a four-note cell (D–C♯–B–A♯) and developed across three sections in a loose sonata form: exposition, development, and finale. I wrote the entire work in a mad burst of energy shortly after my daughter Lîla was born in June 2024. In the corners of time between napping, changing diapers, and doing bottle feeds, while she and my wife were sleeping, the house would settle into a peaceful quiet and I wrote into the small hours of the night. I confess that in this time I’d never felt so happy, unhinged, and tired in my life; combined with the circadian confusion, the trio seemed to write itself, spilling onto the page in the span of only two weeks. I revised it heavily over the subsequent months, and in the end it is a compact work which probably reflects nothing about my life at that time except for the energy with which I wrote it.