Étoiles Par Grand Vent (Homage to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) for piano and guitar (2019)

“Étoiles Par Grand Vent” was written in 2019 for Jay Kacherski (guitar) and Lina Morita (piano).  It is inspired by the life and work of Antoine de Saint-Éxupery, the great French author and pioneering aviator of the 20th century.  Saint-Éxupery is best known throughout the world for his work “The Little Prince;” however, it is his book “Wind, Sand, and Stars” that most directly influenced my composition.  In that autobiographical novel, Saint-Éxupery captures many profound, poetic, and terrifying experiences of flying his airplane in various parts of the world and weather conditions.  My composition seeks to capture the beauty, danger, and poetry of the experiences described by Saint-Éxupery: being caught in a cyclone off the coast of South America, miraculously surviving a crash in the Sahara desert, flying solo at night under the stars, soaring over mountains and the sea.  In this piece, I hope to pay homage to a beautiful human being and a fellow wanderer. 

The work was recorded by the Kacherski-Morita duo in December 2019 on their debut CD, due to be released in 2022.

Approx. duration: 11 min.