Dearly beloved, we are gathered here — the title lifts a phrase associated with ceremonies of love and mourning alike, and the music turns it into an address to someone absent: a single piano, unhurried, moving at roughly the pace of a resting heartbeat, returning again and again to the same tender figure as if checking that a memory is still intact. Nothing lurches or breaks anywhere in it. The harmony stays warm and sustained, the surface never turns harsh, and that refusal to dramatize is precisely what it feels like: grief held in check rather than performed.

Midway, a swell of strings rises beneath the piano and lifts the theme, then withdraws, leaving the piano alone exactly as it began. That shape is the piece's whole argument — loss arrives as a wave, the wave passes, and the one left behind keeps speaking. The final chord is allowed to decay into the room — no resolution, just the silence after the beloved's name.