In 2000, I went to Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor to hear the extraordinary New York harpsichordist Bradley Brookshire. Bradley was an avid performer and commissioner of contemporary music, and when we spoke after the concert, I was thrilled when he asked me to write a new concerto for him.
That conversation eventually led to a commission through the Fromm Music Foundation. The resulting Harpsichord Concerto was premiered in 2003 by Bradley Brookshire with the Corigliano String Quartet at Merkin Hall in New York.
We decided that the harpsichord would be accompanied by a string quartet, allowing its distinctive sound to project without amplification. Then Bradley made one request: he wanted a tango in one of the movements.
At the time, tango was finding a new life in concert music. But his request led me toward a larger question. What might happen if a modern dance entered into conversation with the courtly dances of the eighteenth century?
That question became the heart of the concerto. Time warps and melts over its fifteen minutes as genres and dance forms, new and old, collide and intermingle. The string quartet becomes a vibrant extension of the harpsichord’s rapid decay, and together the five musicians begin to sound like one composite instrument.
Twenty-five years later, Jory Vinikour, Desirée Ruhstrat, Charlene Kluegel, Margaret O’Malley, and David Cunliffe have given the work its premiere recording, captured incomparably by Cedille Records.
I love conversations like these, conversations that transform my own notions of where my music can go. This is often how a commission begins for me: with a performer’s idea that leads us somewhere neither of us could have imagined alone.