Home Stretch (2008) for solo piano and chamber orchestra

Mozart “Coronation” Concerto Re-Composition (2010) for solo piano and chamber orchestra

1. Allegro

2. Larghetto

3. Allegretto

Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno (2010) for chamber orchestra

• Timo Andres, piano

• Owen Dalby, Amalia Hall, Sheryl Hwangbo, Siwoo Kim, Kristin Lee, Sean Lee (Concertmaster), Miho Saegusa, Emily Smith, Elly Suh, Emma Sutton, Tema Watstein, violin

• David Auerbach, Phil Kramp, Eric Nowlin, viola

• Na-Young Baek, Ashley Bathgate, Hiro Matsuo, cello

• Rachel Calin Evan Premo, cello

• Lance Suzuki, flute

• Carl Oswald, James Austin Smith, oboe

• Rebekah Heller, Adrian Morejon, bassoon

• Danielle Rose Kuhlmann, Leelanee Sterrett, French horn

• Jeff Missal, Paul Murphy, trumpet

• Conor Hanick, piano

• Britton Matthews, Sean Statser, percussion

• Andrew Cyr, conductor and Artistic Director

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 the musical resonance of the Mozart and 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 19th-century style 'orchestral paraphrase' on the subject of Eno’s music."

Home Stretch was recorded at Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. 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."

Home Stretch

My good friend Dave Kaplan asked me to write a companion piece to Mozart’s K. 414 concerto for his degree recital. My last attempt at a piano concerto was when I was 15, and since then, I’ve mostly lost interest in the typical “virtuosity for its own sake” soloist versus orchestra dynamic of the genre. Luckily, the Mozart-sized forces led me to approach Home Stretch as chamber music, allowing for more subtle gestures and interplay between musicians.

I also knew I wanted Home Stretch to have something to do with fast cars, which Dave is obsessively interested in. The piece is in three large sections which 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 which 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 to their new context, sometimes balefully interrupting.

Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno

I’ve been absorbing Brian Eno’s music for the past six years or so. I think of him as a major composer, one 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 others’ surfaces.

When Andrew Cyr asked me to write some music to pair with my piano concerto, Home Stretch, I immediately thought of the spacious, static opening section of the piece and the huge debt it owes to Eno’s harmonies and timbres. The result is a 19th-century style “orchestral paraphrase” on the subject of Eno’s music, focusing on the albums Before and After Science and Another Green World, with some Apollo by means of an introduction.

Mozart “Coronation” Concerto

Andrew Cyr gave me the idea to compose a new completion of the Coronation concerto. Mozart notated only a few sections of the left-hand part (intending to improvise it in performance) which I decided to replace entirely, in addition to writing new cadenzas. 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.

A few months earlier, I had discovered a curiosity while culling through my piano teacher Eleanor Hancock’s music library: two cadenzas for Mozart concerti written by Béla Bartók. The gestural language was generally Mozart-style, but some Bartókian harmonies and piano techniques crept in at the edges. The effect is almost vertiginous— the classical ornaments remain, but the structure is replaced with something bold and modern. The challenge for me was to achieve this effect over the course of an entire concerto.

The house style of “my” Mozart concerto results from a several combined strategies. The left hand gets an extended catalogue of gestures (no more tasteful, 18th-century Alberti bass). It uses imitation, counter-melodies, and canonic interplay to participate in the musical drama of the right hand (sometimes even leaping above it in register). Harmonically, new chords both thicken and undermine the existing progressions, adding allusions to music after Mozart’s time (Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Prokofiev, Ives, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Bartók all make appearances). The result is an almost entirely new-sounding piece, which I hope will be an antidote to the studied blandness of most existing completions.

Produced by David Frost

Recorded September 6–7, 2012, in Seiji Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

Recording Engineers: Tim Martyn and Charlie Post

Piano Technician: Barbara Renner

Edited and Mixed by David Frost and Tim Martyn

Mastered by Tim Martyn at Phoenix Audio LLC, Glen Rock, NJ

Design by John Gall

Cover Photograph by William Eggleston

Photographs of Timo Andres by Michael Wilson

Major Support for Home Stretch was generously provided by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Robert D. Bielecki, Crosswicks, Mikhail Iliev, The June K. Wu Artist Fund with additional support from Deutsche Bank USA, Kenny Greif, Cristiane Lemos, Jennifer and Eduardo Loja, Rodney McDaniel, Carol Whitcomb, Roy and Diana Vagelos.

Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno and Mozart Coronation Recomposition were commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble in 2010.