Adam Tendler’s Inheritances

When the pianist Adam Tendler was handed a thick envelope of cash after his father’s unexpected death half a decade ago, he didn’t know what to do with his surprise inheritance. Yes, he was a thriving classical pianist in New York, his DIY approach to programming and presenting new music already earning him a stellar reputation among the city’s cognoscenti. But the city is expensive, of course, and perhaps he could offset his expenses for several months with the windfall. hile watching some friends perform one night, he had an idea: What if he funneled these funds into a series of commissions by some of his favorite composers and wove them into a program about memory and loss, relationships and life? The result is 2024’s Inheritances, a breakthrough album and concert that expresses the pianist’s ambition and emotionally sophisticated playing in entirely new ways.

“If you do accept,” Tendler wrote to the composers he first recruited, “I trust your instincts [to take] the piece in any direction you choose.” Across 16 pieces, they do just that. Tendler responds to Laurie Anderson’s AI text prompts with thunderheads of notes, while Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “The Plum Tree I Planted Still There” moves between wonder and rage, practically rhapsodic as it investigates hallways of remembering. Nico Muhly’s contribution is comforting but blue, Pamela Z’s swelling and breaking and heavy, like grief itself. Inheritances concludes with “Morning Piece,” an 11-minute masterstroke by Blood Orange leader Devonté Hynes. Across its first half, it moves from diaphanous melody into stormy disarray before cracking open almost like a hymn, an act of deliverance from past to future. Tendler performs Inheritances in full at Big Ears 2026.