The Train to Padova

How Odusseia Found Its Stage in Italy

In my last blog, I told the story of how Odusseia got written—the abandoned Silk Road poem, the panic, the bonfire that was supposed to be a candle. This is the story of what happened when we tried to perform it in Europe.

We arrived in Salzburg, Austria, to perform at a concert in the small village of St. Gilgen. Our contact in Salzburg had hired a pianist for us—Ms. Tatiana Aleksandrova, an accompanist who worked at the Mozarteum. Let me say that again, slowly: the Mozarteum. The conservatory where some of the finest musicians in the world study and teach, in the city where Mozart was born. Anthony and I had flown in from Los Angeles with a piece I’d originally written in a deadline panic. And our pianist came from the Mozarteum.

There’s a phrase for this feeling: out of your depth.

But here’s what happens when you put excellent musicians in a room together: the music takes over and the credentials disappear. At our first rehearsal, Tatiana and Anthony clicked immediately. She understood the piece—not just the notes, but what it was trying to do: the shift from Homer’s ancient world into Joyce’s Dublin pub, the Sirens reimagined as Irish session musicians, the whole improbable voyage. The piano part is demanding, and she played it like she’d been living with it for months instead of hours.

The concert in St. Gilgen went beautifully. Small village, intimate audience, the Austrian Alps presumably doing something gorgeous outside the windows. We hadn’t planned to perform Odusseia at our next stop—an International Music Festival in Padova, Italy. The piano writing is exposed and difficult, and we didn’t want to ask a pianist we’d just met to learn it for a second performance on short notice. We had other pieces scheduled for Padova. Odusseia was supposed to stay in Austria.

Tatiana had other ideas. She enjoyed the piece so much that she took the train from Salzburg to Padova—at her own expense—so we could add it to the festival program. I want to sit with that for a moment, because it’s the kind of thing that reminds you why you write music in the first place. A world-class pianist heard something in a piece that a panicking composer had thrown together in under a month, and she got on a train to Italy to play it again. That’s not a professional obligation. That’s an artist saying: this one matters.

The version we performed—in both St. Gilgen and Padova—only gets Odysseus past the island of the Sirens. Homer makes it to Joyce’s Dublin pub, Bloom walks out the door, Dante whispers from the Inferno, and the voyage pauses. I did eventually complete the full piece, bringing Odysseus all the way home to Ithaca and Penelope, and it stretched to nearly thirty-minutes.

But honestly? The shorter version is still our favorite. There’s something right about ending at the Sirens—about stopping the story at the moment of greatest temptation and letting the audience sit with the danger of beautiful music. Odysseus makes it past the island. Whether he makes it home is a question for another concert.

Sometimes the best performances aren’t the ones you plan. They’re the ones that happen because someone gets on a train.

To view the original version of Odusseia, from Padova, use this link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaZsReH3YA

~ Liam