In an interview with the author Edward Strickland, Adams said "I encountered Takemitsu's riverrun, a rather modest piece about fifteen minutes long for piano and orchestra that he wrote for Peter Serkin, who played it in several American cities several years ago, but nobody seemed to have a very strong response.
The English performance I found extraordinarily beautiful and listened to it many times and had the response I often do of writing a piece of my own in order to exorcise it."
"[2] Eros Piano was also influenced by the music of other American composers such as the jazz pianist Bill Evans, for whom Adams and Takemitsu had a shared fondness.
The composer described the piece as "a quiet, dreamy soliloquy for piano, played against a soft, lush fabric of orchestral screens and clusters."
Written after an evening with Toru Takemitsu, it embraces the atmospheric gracefulness of that composer's later style through inventive string voicings, and its solo piano line hints at the shapely improvisations of Bill Evans, to whom the work is in fact a tribute.