With Inheritances, Adam Tendler mines fraught father-son relationship through piano
Music on Main and PuSh Festival present moving solo concert that began with a surprise envelope of cash and a desire to process loss
Adam Tendler took his surprise inheritance from his father and invested it in new pieces by his favourite composers.
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and Music on Main present Adam Tendler’s Inheritances at the Annex on January 24 and 25
IT WAS PROBABLY the oddest parking-lot deal ever consummated: a fat envelope of cash in return for 16 short compositions for solo piano.
Of course, that’s not exactly what happened. When piano virtuoso Adam Tendler met his stepmother in a Denny’s parking lot on the first day of 2020, the envelope was real, and the cash as well; it just took a few months for everything else to play out.
Tendler’s unceremonious gift was his share of his late father’s estate, and not only was the bequest unexpected, the death was, too. In conversation from his New York City rehearsal studio, Tendler is cagey about the exact circumstances of his father’s passing, although he has theories, none of which are for publication. What we can say is that the older Tendler died as he had lived, exerting a mysterious influence on his son from afar.
The pianist is entirely open about their fraught relationship, however, and about how its final act played out. Tendler père had split from Tendler mère when Adam was two, and while their father-son dynamic was not entirely one of estrangement, it did feature steadily increasing distance, until communications were limited to birthday and Father’s Day phone calls.
“It wasn’t like lack of love,” Tendler explains. “It just felt like we were very different people: politically, socially, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we live.”
If the death was a shock, the inheritance was a puzzle. The fateful envelope held a fair bit of money, but not a life-changing amount—or so it seemed at first.
“I just had no idea of what to do with it,” Tendler says. “And there was so much surprise and weirdness and drama around my father’s death that I hadn’t even processed any of it. It really felt like the situation happened in such a weird way that this whole idea of grief was stolen from me, just by the circumstances of it all. I was like ‘What happened?’ I really had no idea, and it felt like the therapy that I was in wasn’t helping to process it.”
What did help, he continues, was taking this unexpected windfall and investing it into “something that maybe might help me feel closer to him, or feel closer to the memory of him”. And so, cash in hand, Tendler called a rather glittering cast of his friends and favourite composers to see if they would write works touching in some way on connection and loss. His instructions, as he revealed in a New York Times essay, were both specific and vague. “If you do accept, I trust your instincts [to take] the piece in any direction you choose,” he wrote. “The only thing I ask is that you let me live with these works until I find them a home, together—somewhere.”
That home turned out to be a concert program for solo piano, Inheritances, which Tendler will present at the Annex on January 24 and 25 as a joint presentation of Music on Main and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. It’s not a memorial, exactly, but rather a chance for Tendler to work through his conflicted feelings in an artistic context—which, he points out, is far more satisfying than couch sessions with an analyst. Rather than therapy, he explains, “the sharing of art—that kind of communal, cathartic experience—has certainly helped me reconcile this loss.
“It’s also helped me reconcile just identity in general, like forgiving myself for who I am, or accepting myself for who I am,” he continues. “It’s such a vulnerable place to be, hearing music, playing music….It feels therapeutic, for sure. When I’m performing, even though I’m really tuned in to the music, there’s almost a kind of selflessness that can actually be very healing. It’s one of the few places where I’m really not self-conscious—and somehow in therapy, actual therapy, I’m very self-conscious. I think the person might be bored; I wonder if they’re judging me; I wonder if I’m being honest; I wonder how we’re going to fill up the time… It’s very hard for me to get out of my head in that process. ‘Am I wasting my money?’ There’s a lot of chatter that is very hard for me to lose when I’m in the therapeutic process.”
Early reports indicate that Tendler has not squandered his inheritance on Inheritances, and the available online clips suggests that the program offers audiences a welcome chance to process their own sorrows.
“The hope was always that the pieces would be abstract enough that listeners can put it wherever they need to put it,” Tendler says. “I want it to be as non-specific as possible to my own story, because it’s more than a tribute to my dad. Frankly—and I don’t mean to put it in a mean way—I don’t think he deserved a tribute. It wasn’t like ‘My amazing father. Let’s pay tribute to him.’ It was something completely different.”
Opening with the artistic curveball of Laurie Anderson’s “Remember I Created You”, which immediately dispels any possible mawkishness through its use of AI-generated text, and closing with the pairing of Nico Muhly’s “Eiris, Sones” with Devonté Hynes’s “Morning Piece”, Inheritances also describes a fascinating narrative path. Following “Remember I Created You”, Tendler says, the program works as a fairly conventional piano recital—but midway through, with inti figgis-vizueta’s “Hushing”, things take a darker and more interdisciplinary turn.
“The pieces become... I don’t want to say more personal, but more literal,” he explains. “Like, in Darian Thomas’s piece [‘We Don’t Need To Tend This Garden. They’re Wildflowers’] I am talking about my dad. It’s the only time I do. And so things become, I think, slightly more sentimental or slightly more personal as the program… Well, I like to call it ‘dissolves’, in a good way. I feel like it kind of falls apart, and that’s part of the design. I kind of want it to fall apart.”
You might fall apart, too. Tendler reports that audiences—and even members of his technical crew—have responded to Inheritances with a combination of gratitude and tears, and not in any predictable pattern. The pianist compares this to his own experience of bursting into tears in front of Michelangelo’s David, on first visiting Florence.
“Sometimes I feel like we just enter really charged spaces, and cathartic releases occur,” he says. “I think that this program can really do that: people have really strong reactions–and they have those reactions all at different times. People have those responses to different pieces, and certainly for different reasons. So that’s a delight for me, because it makes me think that what I wanted to have happen happened—and that makes me happy.”
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