Mico Aquino - Impressions: suite for piano, for Lana Ritchie (2025-26)

for pianist Lana Ritchie (‪@lanaritchie‬), on her 20th birthday. It's not often I compose a work for solo piano longer than 10 minutes, but this one was the exception, mainly due to how I approached my creative process. Passing the University of the Philippines College of Music was a tremendous help for me to become fruitful in composing again. Ms. Ritchie's musical palette is inspiringly vast, which also galvanized me to write a piece of highly diverse attributes—where tonality, bitonality, dodecaphony, and jazz, among others, intersect. "Impressions" began as a short sketch I drafted shortly after a brief conversation with the pianist, whom I met randomly in the comment section under a video of a Kapustin piece. This piano suite serves as my abstract sonic portrait of her 20 years of colorful musical life. I. Larawan (ᜎᜇᜏᜈ᜔) [0:00] Being the preamble to the set, Larawan ('Image' in Tagalog) was the first piece I composed for the initially planned piano suite. The project then remained stagnant for almost nine months until the time finally arrived for me to finish it. II. A-reum (아름) [3:12] Literally translating to "beauty" in Korean, I sought to capture the pulchritude of the exotic and ethereal colors of bitonal music, layered with a subtle Ravelian touch. III. Ngākau [7:15] An impassioned semi-atonal movement, Ngākau (literally translating to "heart", "soul", or "mind" in Maori) revolves around, albeit not strictly, the tone row I concocted based on her name by assigning each character to a pitch class. IV. Aurora [9:18] The final and briefest movement of the set. Named after the Roman goddess who personifies the dawn, this piece captures the absolute first light of morning. Jazzy and swinging, it represents the joy of celebrating one's birthday with soaring optimism.