The Afterglow

The Afterglow (2023)
for Trio Fadolín

Afterglow is a feeling between feelings — it’s the transition between major life events (births, deaths, graduations, weddings) and the next stage.

In my personal case, the beginnings of this piece came to me after a very joyous rehearsal at my alma mater, The Juilliard School, in preparation for a concert the next day at Lincoln Center that united my biological family — my parents Alexander Zhurbin and Irena Ginzburg, and my wife Inna Barmash — with my chosen musical family, the Trio Fadolín, and clarinettists Sam Sadigursky and Zisl Slepovitch.   After everyone left the rehearsal, I had the room to myself. It was eerily quiet.  I wanted to capture this feeling of happiness, of weightlessness, of having created this union of family, even if just once.  I recorded a solo fadolín sketch of the first movement that very moment into my phone.

The following week, I found myself accompanying a production of Witness Theater where a life-threatening event happened at rehearsal.  A sketch for the second movement came out from me, recorded as a video into my iPad.

Months later, Trio Fadolín and my wife Inna were in residence at Avaloch Farms, in New Hampshire. Following a concert, where we previewed a new project, I went into a basement practice room and improvised something raga-like over an F drone from my iPad.   A few days later, I played a solo concert at the Sumner-Knight chapel in Keene NH, during a day of massive rains and flooding in the Northeast, a day when, as I found out later, one of my old friends, lost her life to the torrents.  I played a solo version of the piece then, and the third movement was put together from recordings of these two appearances.

“The Afterglow” premiered in its three-movement version on October 7 2023.