In Memoriam

In Memoriam (2026)

Grief was the reason I began this album.

But I think memory is what it became about.

Not memory as something fixed, but as something that keeps changing shape every time we return to it. And that keeps changing us in return.

The music on this recording spans more than two centuries, yet every work seemed to ask me the same question: how do we carry the people we have loved, the lives we have lived, and the versions of ourselves we have left behind?

Bach's Chaconne, in Busoni's extraordinary transcription, has accompanied me for many years. Whenever I return to it, I discover something different. Its immense architecture seems to contain both despair and hope at the same time, as though the act of continuing were itself a form of consolation.

At the centre of the album sits my own suite, In Memoriam, written during the months following the death of my partner, David. Much of the music grew out of improvisations at the piano, moments when I found myself playing before I knew what I wanted to say.

The opening Prelude emerges slowly from shifting harmonies, as if memory were finding its voice. Elegy was the first improvisation I recorded after nearly two months away from the piano and grows out the heartbeat of a lone repeated note. Stuck in B-flat circles around a single harmonic world that refuses to let go. Buona notte, bello grew from a short improvisation I once sent as a goodnight message during the Covid lockdowns; after losing my partner, those simple words acquired a meaning I could never have anticipated. The closing Coda returns quietly to the music of Elegy, not to resolve it, but simply to accompany it a little further.

Chopin's Second and Fourth Ballades have always fascinated me for the way they allow lyricism and violence to coexist. They seem to understand that contradiction is part of being human. The album closes with the Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 1, whose final pages feel less like an ending than a question left gently unanswered.

The visual artworks accompanying the album were created by New Zealand painter Star Gossage. One of the starting points for this collaboration was a dream I had while travelling in Japan. In it, a voice said simply: "Water has memory. Because it's been in all living things." I remember swimming through immense translucent depths where faces, hands and bodies shimmered beneath the surface: never fully visible, never completely gone. The dream stayed with me long after I woke. It became a quiet metaphor for memory itself: not something we possess, but something we move through.

When I shared this dream, together with some of the letters I had written while composing In Memoriam, with painter Star Gossage, she responded not by illustrating the music, but by entering into the same world of images. Her paintings explore water as a place of memory, transformation and presence: a place where people seem to dissolve without disappearing. Throughout this project I often had the feeling that we were telling the same story in different languages.

Looking back, In Memoriam no longer feels like an album about saying goodbye.

It feels like an album about learning that love does not end when someone disappears from view. It changes form. Like memory itself, it keeps finding new ways to speak.

I am also deeply grateful to Rattle Records for giving this very personal album a home.

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