On New Year’s Day 2020, Adam Tendler unexpectedly received his father’s final gift: a wad of cash stuffed into a manila envelope handed over in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in West Lebanon, NH. The strangely furtive exchange launched a musical journey.

Tendler, a renowned concert pianist who grew up in Barre decided to use his inheritance to commission an all-star cast of modern composers to compose piano pieces exploring the theme of inheritance. In his pitch to his composer friends, Tendler wrote that he wanted “to plant that cash in the soil of something that may actually grow and — if you'll forgive me — live on.” 

To his amazement, every composer he wrote to agreed to contribute. The result is a critically acclaimed album and concert tour called Inheritances, which the New York Times has called a collection of “little masterpieces.” Tendler will perform Inheritances at the Barre Opera House on November 16.

Tendler initially did not know what to do with the money that he received. Taking a trip or paying down a credit card seemed inadequate. “This is an inheritance so something should be done with it that sort of honors the gesture,” he told The Vermont Conversation. 

“The thing I do for a living is ideally creating experiences for people … which [are] cathartic and beautiful and [provide] a sense of connection,” he said. “What if I use it to facilitate that experience for people?” Tendler originally told his story in a 2023 essay for the New York Times, “My Father’s Death, An Envelope of Cash, A Legacy in Music.”

Adam Tendler is a Grammy-nominated pianist and a recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the Yvar Mikhashoff Prize. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called him "currently the hottest pianist on the American contemporary classical scene." After graduating from Indiana University, Tendler performed solo recitals in all fifty states as part of a grassroots tour he called America 88x50. He has appeared as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony and at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and other venues. He is on the piano faculty of the Steinhardt School at New York University. 

Tendler took a circuitous route from Barre to the concert stages of the world. After college, he worked at the landfill in Coventry and was a substitute teacher at U32 and Twinfield high schools. His relationship to his hometown is both affectionate and ambivalent. 

“I love Barre, I love Vermont, but it wasn't really the most easy place to grow up as a queer kid,” he recalled. “Music was a safety hatch … a real place within which I could hide, protect myself, express myself. I created a little fortress within it."

"That vessel motivated me to actually start to really train to the point of getting into conservatory.”

Tendler said that his work on Inheritances transformed his complicated feelings about his “semi-estranged” father “into something that feels like a companion in a good way.”

“This project and having to sort of confront him on a human level, even though we're talking about music, has brought me back to him. I am my father's son. We are family.”