The Wintergreen Music Festival's faculty piano trio performs Daron's three minute meditation on a program that also features works by Gilda Lyons and Michael White. For more information about "Intensive Care," please click here.
The Phoenix Concert Series in New York City commissioned Intensive Care in 2011 as part of "the Folktale Project" for premiere performances by the Beijing New Music Ensemble, the Finisterra Piano Trio, and the Entelechron Piano Trio. Each of the fistful of composers tapped was asked to relate in music a folk tale that figured prominently in their own personal mythology. I chose the Icarus myth.
The Icarus legend is so central to my poetic memory and personal mythology that it has inspired (in part or whole) a slew of works over the years, including Flight Music (2005) for treble voices and string quartet, Icarus (2006) for solo clarinet, the grand opera Amelia (2010) -- in which Icarus and Daedalus are characters -- Book of Days (2011), a trio for clarinet, viola, and piano, and a movement from my Symphony No. 5 (2014).
The form of the piece is that of a mobile, with each musical idea a separate element, all the elements in constant, Varèse-like motion. There are four elements: the "heart monitor" ostinato idea inIntensive Care (an emphatic fortissimo pizzicato, doubled with a martellato piano stroke) originates in the scene from the opera Amelia where Icarus and his father Daedalus are reimagined as a contemporary father and son who has "fallen from a great height." The "S-O-S" "rhythmic tattoo" originates in Flight Music, and represents Amelia-Earhart-as-Icarus-figure's electronic calls for help. The "piano roulades" originate in a song called "Coming," from the cycle Larkin Songs (2001). The "lyrical tune" began as the subject of a memorial symphony (1983) that I wrote (conducted with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, and then immediately withdrew, its purpose fulfilled) when my best friend in Philadelphia, Norman Stumpf, took his life.