As spring 2022 bloomed, Irena Wang emailed the pianist Kelly Moran to ask for a mixtape. They had briefly met just days before — at the funeral of Wang’s partner of seven years and Moran’s high-school sweetheart in the little Long Island town where they grew up. “He was my first love, my first heartbreak, my first everything,” Moran remembered one evening after dark in Yamaha’s sprawling Midtown Manhattan piano studio in early February, a week before she turned 36. After the funeral, Wang sent her an email: “I really want to know you, but I need some time. Late last year, they moved in together; with Luka, Wang and Damian’s son, the members of this unorthodox trio have empowered one another past the shadow of grief.

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Persons: Irena Wang, Kelly Moran, “, ” Moran, ”, Damian, Moran, Wang, John Adams’s “, —, Luka Organizations: — Locations: Midtown Manhattan, Los Angeles, Big