Tobias Picker

Invisible Lilacs

I wrote Invisible Lilacs in 1991 for Young Uck Kim (who commissioned it) and Emanuel Ax. They premièred it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years later. Since that time, Bobby MacDuffie has taken up the piece. He plays it dazzlyingly. Just before I began composing Invisible Lilacs, I had read Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. A sentence from it captured my imagination and I wanted to respond to it in this piece: 'When, on a summer evening, the melodious sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is the memory of the Méséglise way that makes me stand alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.' Tobias Picker