Brian Field’s Three Passions for Our Tortured Planet Draws Global Participation
by Fanny Po Sim Head August 6th, 2023
Two years since its inception, Field’s suite for solo piano sees dozens of live performances, recordings and multi-media collaboration to fund non-profit support.
In 2021, American composer Brian Field penned Three Passions for our Tortured Planet, a dramatic multi-movement piano suite designed to foster continuous global awareness about climate change. I interviewed Brian two years ago as the project was just beginning, and recently followed up on exciting progress he has made since the project’s inception to learn about how it has grown, and the impact made on both the musical and environmental community.
Fanny: Brian, first off, a big congratulations for Three Passions for our Tortured Planet. I understand that it has not only been performed many times worldwide, but has also won several awards including the Platinum Prize in the Beethoven International Music Competition and First Prize at the Golden Keys Piano Festival this year.
Brian: Thank you! The project is two years in, has been doing very well on multiple fronts with dozens of pianists having joined the project so far from all parts of the world giving live performances and also a great many social-media based recordings that artists have created to further amplify the message across those channels.
Some pianists have also chosen to commercially record selected movements, and both Spanish pianist Irene Cantos and Russian pianist Vasilisa Bogorodskaya have commercially released recordings of the entire suite. Kay Kyung Eun Kim—to whom the piece was originally dedicated—is also releasing a commercial recording of the work in January 2024 on the Steinway label as part of a collection of piano music, including those by John Corigliano and Philip Glass.
Fanny: Three Passions for our Tortured Planet includes the movements Fire, Glaciers, and Winds – each focusing on a particular theme of climate change. While they were all originally written for piano, have you thought about arranging them for other instruments or integrating them with other types of media?
Brian: The first movement, “Fire”, has already been arranged for various other instrumental settings – for solo marimba, saxophone quartet and string quartet as well. There have also been some very inventive multimedia presentations of the suite. For example, in Romania, pianist Elena Popa created an immersive version in an underground club that included projected images upon on-stage props.
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