Um Dia Bom
Um Dia Bom (2021)
Um Dia Bom is just that, A Good Day. Its five movements depict a life from morning to midnight and beyond, but as if told to children. Hovering in the Cradle, the opening movement tries to paint the infinite potential in the eyes of a newborn child. There might be a fairy hovering, or it’s simply the child’s eyes wondering. The second movement, …while the rain… started as a blessing I wrote for the marriage of my oldest daughter, Talia, to Yevgeni, her husband. It takes off from the poem that Vivaldi wrote to accompany the second movement of Winter in the Four Seasons: “To spend content and quiet days near the fire, while, outside, the rain soaks hundreds” You can hear the rain throughout this movement, while a dancing couple glides on the marble floors of an Italian palazzo. Around the Fire, the third movement, is a traditional Yiddish song that also talks about the bliss of being together around a small fire. In my version, the song appears and disappears, as a ghost, in the midst of a slow processional and restrained tears. Schubert’s motif of the slow movement of Death and the Maiden is in the background throughout that first section. A different manifestation of Death interrupts the processional in a short and furiously baroque appearance that opens the door to three funny and mischievous dance variations on the B section of the Yiddish song. The movement closes with the reemergence of the opening processional. I wrote this movement in memory of Guillermo Limonic, who loved singing in Yiddish, and died of Covid in the early days of the pandemic. Riding with Death, the fourth movement, is based on the late Basquiat painting of the same name. It is a sparse painting, in which the horse carrying the Death Rider is represented only by its essential bones, like an X-Ray drawn by a child. The music is a gallop in the viola and cello, over which the violins “X-Ray” the melody of Willie Blind Johnson’s Dark was the Night, playing just filaments and short echoes of the song. Feather, the closing movement, describes a graceful, endless fall of a feather from the sky. Here is where I felt the spirit of Chick Corea more present than ever. He died while I was writing this quartet and at the same time studying his Children Songs.