Evocation
for solo piano (2006)
duration: 8’
GRT • 121

YouTube
evocation-vid

recordings available
Satellite Mapping
Complete works for solo piano (1989–2014)
Amir Farid
Move Records, MD3402, 2016

Veiled Virtuosity
Amir Farid, piano
Move Records

score available from
Australian Music Centre

program note
This piece was commissioned to commemorate the life of Daniel McCluskey, who died suddenly in January of 2006. He was an accomplished law and music student at the University of Melbourne and an orchestration student of mine in 2004 – a subject for which he received first class honours. In that same year he included ‘Evocation’ (from Albéniz’ cycle, Iberia) in his solo piano program and that piece provided a loose starting point for this one, with the idea that Daniel might have his own ‘Evocation’.

reviews
“The interleaving pieces give this expert young artist more space to stretch his interpretative wings in a delicate review of Liszt's mildly virtuosic third Consolation, matched by Stuart Greenbaum's elegiac
Evocation, which Farid premiered four years ago."
Clive O’Connell, The Age, April 2010

Evocation of 2006 sits as a kind of memento mori concerning one of Greenbaum’s students who died young; the Albeniz connection is a vague one, although the ostinato has some congruence with a permeating figure in the Spaniard’s piece. And the composer’s avoidance of the anticipated in his disposition of the descending five-note scale pattern in the work’s last third is masterly.”
Clive O’Connell, O’Connell the Music, August, 2016

Evocation was written to commemorate the life of Daniel McCluskey, a former student of Greenbaum who died suddenly in 2006. Rather than having a sorrowful mood, it is one of forward momentum, optimism and expansion. It was premiered by McCluskey’s colleague Amir Farid, who would surely experience profound feelings whenever he performs it, as he does here.”
Gwen Bennett, Music Trust E–Zine, September 2016