LILY OF THE VALLEY | Flower Catalog | Solo Piano | Adrienne Park

“The Lily of the Valley was like a love letter from grandpa to grandma”-Adrienne
This work is all about the delicate and tiny cream-colored flowers known as Lily of the Valley, and it is also all about Adrienne's grandparents: a husband who planted flowers in the yard nearly at random so that his wife would be surprised every spring as flowers came up out of the ground, all over the place.
A constant and reliable springtime visitor, however, was a tuffet of Lily of the Valley flowers that he planted outside her kitchen window...decades after they were planted, they still come up every year. This work is written in honor of Adrienne's grandparents, and speaks to the magic and perfume that these little flowers give off with such abundance, and a long, long romance out of which blossomed flowers and a family.
Lily of the Valley is 5 minutes long and is a bit of a moto perpetuo at first, ebullient staccato sixteenth notes eventually giving way to a tender, fragile second section. An aching, plodding third section brings us to our dewy ending: the sixteenth notes again, now dissonant and crystalline, lead the music towards an icy ending whose notes ring like small bells.