Timo Andres’s Home Stretch out on Nonesuch July 30
Timo Andres, piano
Metropolis Ensemble
Andrew Cyr, conductor
ANDRES: Home Stretch
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 26 in D, “Coronation” (Completed by Andres)
ANDRES: Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno
NPR Music: “First Listen” streams Home Stretch in its entirety this week.
Click here for the stream.
On Timo Andres’s upcoming Nonesuch album, Home Stretch (July 30, 2013), he performs with Andrew Cyr and the Metropolis Ensemble, pairing the title work with two reinventions of works by musical heroes Mozart and Brian Eno: Mozart’s “Coronation” concerto andParaphrase on Themes of Brian Eno. Album pre-orders are available now at nonesuch.com and include an exclusive print of the first page of the Home Stretchscore, autographed by the composer. To celebrate the release, Andres, artist and book designer Peter Mendelsund and the New Yorker’s Leo Carey will host a conversation about artistic influence. The event will be held at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe on July 30 at 7:00 PM, and is free. Andres will perform music from the record, including his own work and pieces by Brian Eno and Mozart.
Tuesday, July 30
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10012
Free
Home Stretch was written for pianist David Kaplan and was conceived as a companion piece to Mozart’s Piano Concerto, No. 12, K. 414. Andres wanted the piece to reflect his friend Kaplan’s personality. Andres notes, “I knew I wanted Home Stretch to have something to do with fast cars, which David is obsessively interested in. The piece is in three large sections that gradually accelerate: beginning in almost total stasis, working up to an off-kilter dance with stabbing accents and ushering in a sturm-und-drang cadenza that riles itself up into a perpetual-motion race to the finish. However, there are always little ‘smudges’ of music from each section in the others, sometimes fitting into their new context, sometimes balefully interrupting.”
Also on the album is Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 26 in D, “Coronation,” completed by Andres. A virtuosic improviser, Mozart left much of the solo part unwritten as he expected to play the piece himself. In particular, the left hand is mostly absent from the original manuscript. Pianists generally play from a completed score that adds simple accompaniment patterns and harmonies for the left hand, but Andres’s treatment of the concerto takes a wholly different approach. He inserts his own voice into the left hand and ends the work with newly written cadenzas. He explains, “I approached the piece not from a scholarly or editorial perspective, but more as a sprawling playground for pianistic invention and virtuosity, taking cues from the composer-pianist tradition Mozart helped to crystallize.” The New Yorker’s Alex Ross wrote on his blog that the result is “mesmerizing.”
The recording ends with Andres’s Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno. Already an influential force in popular music history, Brian Eno is increasingly gaining recognition from classical composers. As Andres writes, Eno is a composer with “two quite distinct sides: as an innovator who works in ambient and collage music, and as a quirky and crafty pop songwriter. It’s all interesting, but the really amazing things happen when these musical personalities overlap and wear away each other’s surfaces.” In Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno, Andres focuses on Eno’s albums Before and After Science and Another Green World. He builds what he terms, “a nineteenth century style ‘orchestral paraphrase’ on the subject of Eno’s music.”
Home Stretch was recorded at Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood and was produced by David Frost. It is Andres’s second album with the Nonesuch label; his first, Shy and Mighty, was praised by the New York Times for its “inventiveness and originality,” and by the Guardian for the way it “glides across stylistic boundaries in a totally unselfconscious way.”
Timo Andres is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. His debut album, Shy and Mighty, which features 10 interrelated pieces for two pianos, performed by Andres and pianist David Kaplan, was released by Nonesuch Records in May 2010 to critical acclaim. Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker that Shy and Mighty “achieves an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene… more mighty than shy, [Andres] sounds like himself.” In the current season, Andres plays a solo recital of his own works alongside those by Chopin, Thomas Adès and Schumann for Lincoln Center’s Great Performers; a solo recital for San Francisco Performances, and a duo program with Gabriel Kahane for the Library of Congress. Commissions include a new piano quintet written for Jonathan Biss and the Elias String Quartet, presented by Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, and San Francisco Performances; a solo piano work for Kirill Gerstein commissioned by the Gilmore Foundation, and a new string quartet for the Library of Congress, to be premiered by The Attacca Quartet.
Leo Carey is a Senior Editor at the New Yorker magazine, where he has worked for 15 years. He was born in Oxford, England and studied English Literature at Oxford University. As an editor at the New Yorker, he has worked on a wide range of non-fiction. His own writings have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement. In his spare time he plays the piano and cello.
Peter Mendelsund is the Associate Art Director of Alfred A. Knopf Books, the Art Director of Pantheon Books and Art Director of Vertical Press (and a recovering classical pianist). His designs have been described by the Wall Street Journal as being “the most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction.” His writing on literature, design and other matters can be found on his blog: jacketmechanical.
New York-based Metropolis Ensemble is a Grammy-nominated chamber orchestra dedicated to classical music in its most contemporary forms.
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe is one of downtown New York’s most vital cultural institutions, presenting an eclectic mix of events — from readings and concerts to comedy nights and storytelling competitions -– featuring many of today’s most exciting artists. The bookstore is staffed almost entirely by volunteers and 100 percent of its profits go to Housing Works, Inc., which provides housing, healthcare, job training, and advocacy for New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. As an independent cultural center, it offers patrons a unique opportunity to join the fight against AIDS and homelessness simply by buying or donating books; eating at the cafe; coming to concerts, readings, and special events; or volunteering on their staff.
Kevin Fox, Founding Artistic Director of the Grammy-winning Pacific Boychoir Academy (PBA), is one of America’s few full-time boys choir directors. The Los Angeles Times called PBA’s musical sophistication and quality of sound “Astonishing”. Starting in 1998 with six choristers, Mr. Fox now runs the music program for over 170 students in PBA’s after-school program and day school, the only full-time choir school on the West Coast, where students’ daily music studies are integrated into a full academic curriculum.
Two-time GRAMMY nominee and Avery Fisher career grant recipient Jennifer Frautschi has gained acclaim as an adventurous musician with a wide-ranging repertoire. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, “violinist Jennifer Frautschi is molding a career with smart interpretations of both warhorses and rarities.” Equally at home in the classic repertoire as well as twentieth and twenty-first century works, in recent seasons she has focused on such composers as Berg, Schoenberg, Prokofiev and Schumann, and premiered several new works composed for her.
Though the six-man ensemble Hudson Shad (five singers and a pianist) debuted officially in 1992, their nucleus formed in 1977 when three of them made their Carnegie Hall debuts as soloists in Penderecki’s Magnificat. Throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, their members were in demand as early music specialists, oratorio soloists and opera singers, and most of them sang at one time or another as Gentlemen of the Choir at St. Thomas Church in NYC.
Sarah Rothenberg is a pianist of “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare) and “a prolific and creative thinker” (Wall Street Journal) who is recognized internationally for her innovative interdisciplinary performances linking music to literature and visual art. Active as performer, writer, concert curator and institution builder, she has been artistic director of Da Camera in Houston since 1994, general director since 2011, and previously was co-founder of the Bard Music Festival. 
Born in a family of theater and fascinated by connections between scene, text and music, Wilfried Wendling has already realized about 15 multidisciplinary shows, presented in many theaters and operas, on texts of Beckett, Camus, Nietzsche, Perec, Queneau, Jouet, Müller, or Boltanski. His musical compositions are also played on numerous stages and festivals. As a musician and\or video director, he has collaborated with numerous artists of many disciplines. Wilfried Wendling is at present director of France’s La Muse en Circuit, National Centre of Musical Creation.
Anna Bowen is thrilled to be performing at the 69th Ojai Music Festival. Her credits include the on-Broadway production of 101 Dalmatians, as well as several off-Broadway productions, including The Music of Motown, Rom and Julz, Doubletime, and Wanda’s World. On the West Coast, she has appeared in Les Miserables, RENT, Aladdin, Aida, Evita, among others, as well as with the Transcendence Theatre Company. Also active on television, her credits include appearances on Castle, Mixology, Law and Order SVU, and As The World Turns. She can be seen around Los Angeles singing with the Overstreets New Orleans Jazz Band, The Melodies, and with eclectic singer Lawrence Rothman. Bowen’s non-fiction book of interviews, Me+You, is available now and her forthcoming work, Being Biracial, will be published next spring.
Charlotte Cannon, originally from Brighton, England, is a recent alumnus of the Chicago College of Performing Arts. Since graduating last May she has had the opportunity to collaborate on new works with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lookingglass Theatre Company, Chicago Children’s Choir, Red Tape Theatre, The Inappropriate Theatre Company, and Fearless Theatre. She is represented by Stewart Talent.
Hailing from San Francisco, Josephine Chan (11) started piano lessons at the age of six. She is currently a scholarship student in the Pre-College Division at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studies piano performance with Corey McVicar. She was awarded top prize at the 2012 San Francisco Chopin Competition, and has enjoyed success at several competitions including the 2015 Marilyn Mindell Piano Competition, the 2011 and 2013 Junior Bach Festivals, and the 2013 American Protégé International Piano Competition. Performance highlights include: Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the San Francisco Conservatory Fanfare Luncheon, San Francisco Conservatory Showcase Concert, and Lang Lang’s 101 Pianists Workshop.
A professional actor since the age of seven, performance flows naturally from this one-man circus. Colin Creveling discovered ensemble-based circus while pursuing his passion for theatre at the Chicago Conservatory for Performing arts. Inspired by the instruction of Keland Scher, David Kersnar, and Douglas Grew, he began working with Lookingglass Theatre Company in collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This union of theatre and circus was the catalyst for the creation of the Inappropriate Theatre Company, an ensemble of physical actors and circus performers who develop large-scale spectacle performances and character-driven circus acts for shows and events within the city. Having spent the last 3 years on and off the road, from 150 shows at the largest beach resort in India to the country’s foremost traveling youth circus, Smirkus, Colin is elated to be working with his CCPA family and the monumentally talented artists and staff of the Ojai Music Festival and UC Berkeley.
615 W. Ojai Ave.