The composer and pianist Timo Andres’s take on the “Coronation” (otherwise known as the Piano Concerto No. 26 in D) felt necessary — not a lark but a surprisingly moving dazzler.
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Timo Andres
His second record, last year’s “Home Stretch,” boldly fills in the absent left hand of Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto and also offers up a 14-minute “Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno.”
The 56th Annual Grammy Awards on January 26, 2014 proved to be a stellar night for the artists and collaborators of Metropolis Ensemble in multiple winning categories!
Home Stretch is a gentle gondola ride through five lovely Eno songs ... a clever, lovingly orchestrated homage in the time-honored spirit of Franz Liszt.
In the reinvention of the Coronation Concerto on Home Stretch, Andres lets his imagination fill in the gaps, and creates a lovely amalgam of Mozartian classicism and modern pianistic sensibility.
The different music on composer-pianist Timo Andres’ Home Stretch — a rhythmically modern piece for piano and chamber orchestra, a reimagination of Mozart’s Coronation concerto, and a “paraphrase” of themes written by an experimental, ambient musician — is an adventure in time, in terms of tempo and stylistic history.
On his new album, Home Stretch, Andres plays off of works by Brian Eno and Mozart, matching his reinventions of those pieces with a composition of his own. The result is a buoyant and fascinating record.
The centrepiece of this latest collection on Home Stretch is a perfect example of Andres's playful intelligence and individuality.
“An ambitious and confident performance resulting in a compelling blend of ancient and modern.”
“Thought-provoking glimpses into how the past and the present merge in classical music today.”
When Timo Andres made his debut full-length recording for Nonesuch in 2009, with the two-piano set Shy and Mighty, most of the talk focused on how it seemed to announce a genuine young composer of interest. Less mentioned was Andres’s own monstrous technique, yet Andres is not so much a great composer with sufficient piano skills as a pure double threat. That’s going to be harder to ignore, starting with Home Stretch: For this follow-up, Andres has taken on Mozart’s “Coronation” piano concerto, along with a few new compositions of his own. Well: Make that one brand-new composition, and two halvsies.
For example, Andres’s “Coronation” is a “co-composition,” which takes the infamously unfinished left-hand piano part of Wolfgang’s and completes it with a 21st-century American, post-minimalist flair. Andres humbly calls his rumbling additions (mostly found in the left-hand part) a “bastardization” of the Mozart style, but more often than not, his crunchy dissonances and harmonic detours bear some relationship to the master’s roadmap. And the performance, undertaken with the Metropolis ensemble, has a flowing, unified feel. It’s the rare “based on” item that feels impishly creative while remaining sufficiently reverent.
The other two “originals” on this program are strong, too. “Home Stretch,” though it shows up on this album as one long track, is a piano concerto in three movements that’s worth its deliberate pacing. And “Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno” works as a counterpart to Andres’s “completed” Mozart concert. Once again, Andres’s touch steers clear of basking in easy familiarity; his final setting of the Eno song “By This River” is recognizable, but hardly derivative.
The only thing working against this album-as-an-album is that it perhaps doesn’t “flow” in an ideal way; you might be better served by taking each of these divergently structured pieces separately, at different sittings. But, as jaded recital audiences in New York have found whenever the pianist stuns both with his own pieces as well as with repertoire as familiar as Schumann and Chopin, it may only be because Andres is an artist with more talents than a single album’s sequencing can contain.
Seth Colter Walls