A pianist with a queenlike posture, a shock of long flowing hair and a pair of haunting eyes, my grandmother, Russian pianist Roza Eidus had a gentle, light touch that seemed at odds with her often muscular approach to life. A child prodigy at the Moscow Conservatory, at 12 she was busy perfecting her Mozart and early Beethoven while Nazis were wiping out her extended family in Latvia. By 18 she has developed a flair for the grandeur of Liszt, Chopin, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff. Despite being a woman, and Jewish, she enjoyed a brief career as a concert pianist appearing with major orchestras in the Soviet Union, a career that came to a halt with my father’s birth. The incessant devotion to “Music” stayed with her for her entire life. Even during the last decade of it, already in Israel, Rosa felt and conducted herself as the great emissary of the grand school of Russian Romantic pianism. Well into her eighties, and on the cusp of Alzheimer’s, she couldn’t recall names of relatives, yet would still arrange house concerts performing her favorite Chopin’s Grand Valse Brillante. Rosa passed away while I was working on this piece, and traces of her valse inevitably found their way in. “Deliver To The Winds” is dedicated to her memory.

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—Mátti Kovler