Where The Rivers Go

FOR SOLO PIANO

Details

Duration: 10’

Composer’s Note

Late one summer night in 1994 at my studio in the country, I saw down at the piano and composed Where the Rivers Go. I wrote it as I had Old and Lost Rivers – in one sitting. I had just begun work on my first opera Emmeline and this moddy, emotional music in B-flat minor became the basis of the opera's opening scene setting words that concern loss, sadness and religious faith. I originally wrote Where the Rivers Go for Tzimon Barto but I did not give the piece to my publisher until recently and, except for a performance at a private concert Barto gave in the Berlin home of the writer Irene Dische in the fall of 2006, Where the Rivers Go stayed on a shelf, until Ursula Oppens gave the first public performance in the spring of 2007 at a small recital in New York City. She had not known it existed until I'd dusted it off again in the fall of 2006. 

— Tobias Picker