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Programme Note

On an Unwritten Letter (Su una lettera non scritta)

Composer note:

The title of this short piano piece is borrowed from a poem by Eugenio Montale, found in his book La Bufera (1956). The piece and the poem seem, coincidentally, to share a similar atmosphere. One line reads, “The bottle from the ocean, moving between the rocky cliffs, still hasn’t reached you.”

Montale returned often to this image, sometimes suggesting that it conjured up the uncertainty, patience, and fatalism involved in launching his poems.

— John Harbison