We were having dinner together in Cancún in December 2021 with my family when Farizat Tchibirova shared a vision she had in dreams that night. She saw both of us playing together at the piano with an orchestra and in the dream she felt the presence of her sister, my much beloved piano teacher from childhood Zarema Tchibirova who had sadly passed away a few years before. And in the vision Zarema said these words to her sister: “fire of love.” Farizat concluded her retelling of this dream-vision with: “And that’s why you should write a work for piano four hands and orchestra and we need to perform it together —and the theme of the work shall be the fire of love”. I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but I do remember saying that I didn’t feel like the idea of four hands, but that I would be very happy to write a concerto “for only two hands” for her to premiere, and that it would bear the inscription in memoriam Zarema Tchibirova— which it now does. It took a few days of convincing that it was okay for me not to be playing four hands, but eventually Farizat consented. And so it was that I embarked on this quest to write a requiem of sorts in the form of a piano concerto that also encapsuled the fire-of-love idea.

When I got back to my studio in January 2022 I looked for some sketches I remembered having that I thought could be used for the new piano concerto. Ever since I first wrote the sketches I fondly called them “the fa-mi-la sketches” because they consisted of only three long notes (F, E and A) and several ways in which they could be harmonized and transformed. These so-called fa-mi-la sketches date back to at least 2019, which is the earliest date I can decisively attribute to them. At that time, however, I was ill and in the middle of a very complicated move back from Italy to Mexico, with the pandemic complicating and delaying things even more, so that little progress was made at all.

It was not until June 2022 that I started work in earnest for the commission. Later that same month Farizat, my wife Maritza and I all met with Roberto Rentería, director of Sistema Nacional de Fomento Musical (National System of Musical Endowment) in Mexico City. The date of the premier was set and the orchestra and conductor where confirmed, and it all became very official. It was a huge honour, too, to find out that Fomento Musical had agreed to co-commission the work along with Farizat.

The next day Farizat organised a lunch at her place were Eduardo García Barrios, who was to conduct the premiere, my wife Maritza and I were all present. Eduardo was an old friend. We had met when I was barely 12 years old in Tijuana and he was music director of the Orquesta de Baja California. After lunch I showed Eduardo some sketches and played some audio demos on Dorico, with which he was very pleased.

Now, as far as instrumentation for the concerto, I had to settle on that fairly early. As a pianist myself I knew the concerto repertoire quite well, but I got my scores out again and looked at it from a composer’s perspective. Here are a few examples I considered:

As is fairly clear, the woodwind group is very standardized even when comparing the Classical concerti with the late Romantic ones (with the only caveat perhaps being that Mozart and Beethoven did use one flute instead of two now and then). The brass section, on the other hand, does show more fluctuation, particularly as we get closer and closer into the twentieth century. With Brahms, the horns gain two players for a total of four, but he otherwise stays with Beethoven’s instrumentation. Rachmaninov then adds the low brass, which was missing and some percussion. But, interestingly, Prokofiev, does not add anything to Rachmaninov’s forces—not even in his massive Second Piano Concerto. To me, that indicated that he was wary of covering the soloist with the orchestra. And, considering the extraorindary variety of colours that he conjures up with this instrumentation, I decided I would be in very good company if I followed suit (without the extra percussion).

I kept sketching and improvising to find new ways to mould that fa-mi-la idea that shapes the entire concerto, and I still had to find a way to address the fire-of-love theme that Farizat had asked for. That proved quite hard. I could not for the life of me understand how love itself could be captured in abstract music—until one afternoon it came to me: I could hide quotations from my own song cycle Venus & Adonis. What better way of weaving love into the concerto than with the themes for the goddess of love herself? It took some time to work those delicate threads into the fabric of the concerto without it becoming intrusive or feeling alien to the work. In the end the result was quite subtle and can perhaps only be noticed by the sharpest of eyes (or ears).

By then, the large-scale plan was not very clear: there were five potential movements. Not that I thought it would become a five-movement concerto, but I entertained the possibility of a four-movement one for some time. At some point it became clear to me, because of the magnitude of the sketches, that I had to trim down to three movements. I discarded a scherzo and a cantilena in a lilting 6/8 (saving these for future use in other works) and in one fell swoop the audience was spared from a mammoth, elephantine concerto. It was thus that the concerto assumed its final form in the canonical threemovement scheme with its fast–slow–fast sequence.

Around October 2021 I visited Mexico City to look through my sketches with Farizat. There I worked on the piano part of the second movement quite a bit, but after the visit Farizat asked me to concentrate on the third movement and the first which are technically more demanding so that she could have more time to look at them.

During the first week of December 2022 the third movement was completed. Although I started it last, it was the first to be finished. I then concentrated on finishing the first movement, for which I had plenty of sketches. The problem was one of compression, rather than expansion. And all the while, I kept sending Farizat whatever I could consider “done” (as hard as that is to determine) so she could have as much time as possible to study and prepare the work. The first movement was finished on 16 January 2023. The Adagio was finished last. The Adagio (and, therefore, the entire concerto) was finished with barely any time to spare. I signed the work in Mexicali at my in-laws’ on 2 February 2023.

As a composer, however, finishing the music seldom means you’re done. It just means that the grueling work of typesetting and preparing the performance materials has just begun. I had ten days to finish by the hard deadline. It was ten days of hell—made even tougher after eight long months of very hard work on this and other commissions being premiered before it. Very little sleep and very long hours meant that on 13 February at 1∶30 a.m. I sighed a big sigh of relief: my work on the concerto was done. By Rodrigo Ruiz.