Program Note:
“Con gái,” translates from Vietnamese into contemporary English as “daughter.” In the opera Amelia, commissioned by Seattle Opera and premiered in 2010, a downed American pilot’s final words, as he draws a snapshot of his daughter back in the States from his flight jacket and shows it to the Vietnamese couple whose daughter has just been killed, are “con gái.” During production, this moment moved Jerry and me as fathers deeply, as well as the parallel moment of saudade later in the opera in which Daedalus simultaneously leaves the hospital after saying goodbye for the last time to his dying son Icarus and Amelia tenderly greets her newborn daughter. As Jerry’s term as music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra ended and he began his farewell to Seattle, a Gund / Simoniyi commission came my way to craft a brief piece celebrating his service. I marked the occasion by reprising the trumpet flourishes in the opera that I composed to accompany Amelia’s birth several years earlier as a tribute to his beginnings as a trumpet player, our first artistic collaboration, and our shared bond as fathers.
