dreamt of you last night – as if I were playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.

-Vladimir Nabokov, letter to Vera

These words evoke such tenderness, intimacy and emotion. In this piece, allow them to exist like a stage direction for an actor – the piece begins in this moment of yearning, the piece lives within this paradoxical moment. The viola and piano interact with each other in fantasy-like gestures. When I was developing material for this piece, I often would begin improvising directly from the end of whatever score I was studying that day: the feeling of beginning from something else’s ending. The end of a piece holds a particular sense of transformation, and often I would not resolve the final cadence, my improvisation emerging from a hazy blur, the yearning expanse of a precipice not reached.

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