Kevin Gunia
composer and pianist

"It's not 'why?'; It's 'why not?'"

In the last year or so, I’ve spent the most in-person time with Abe. We’ve gotten to know each other so well that we easily build off of each other’s ideas (for better or for worse) and can often read each other’s minds. When starting this portrait album, I immediately knew I wanted Abe’s portrait to be in multiple movements. In the first movement I captured the serious, the second movement the romantic, and the third movement the silly. The style of this work refers to Abe’s love of the variation form. Though this was unintentional, it is fitting, since Abe is a virtuoso pianist, that this portrait is particularly difficult to execute. Why not?