An Intimate Evening of Solo Piano with Timo Andres
September 21, 2024
4pm wine reception; 5pm concert
Wethersfield Estate and Garden
257 Pugsley Hill Road
Amenia, New York, 12501
Tickets available soon
Celebrating a two-decade artistic collaboration, Grammy-nominated Metropolis Ensemble and composer/pianist Timo Andres present solo piano works inspired by Andres’ recent Carnegie Hall debut (February 2024) of quintessentially varied American music including delicate piano masterpieces by Duke Ellington, the last of Philip Glass’s 20 piano etudes, and Frederic Rzewski’s boisterous Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues.
Also featured will be Andres new work Fiddlehead (2024 Carnegie Hall commission), highlighting Andres’ “textural imagination and ear for piquant harmony” (The Guardian), and a New York premiere by the inventive Gabriella Smith.
A Wethersfield and Metropolis Ensemble co-presentation. This recital is underwritten through Wethersfield by an Anonymous Donor and the Soo & Carolina Kim Foundation.
“The question of what constitutes ‘Americanness’ in art has long interested me. It was little more than 100 years ago that composers started writing music that sounded ‘American,’ transcending the Eurocentric pastiches of earlier efforts. It’s a recent enough occurrence that one can still imagine different paths composers could’ve taken, could still take. These works represent, to me, the best qualities in American music —a directness, almost bluntness, that manages to be at once vernacular and avant-garde.”
—Timo Andres
Timo Andres performs “Wherein Lies the Good” by Robin Holcomb recorded at home in Brooklyn (March 2020).
On the Program
Timo Andres: Fiddlehead (2023 Carnegie Hall commission)
Robin Holcomb: Wherein Lies the Good (1995)
Duke Ellington: The Single Petal of a Rose (1958; arr. Timo Andres)
Gabriella Smith: Imaginary Pancake 8’ (2020 Carnegie Hall commission)
Duke Ellington: Reflections in D (1953; arr. Timo Andres)
Frederic Rzewski: Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Duke Ellington: Prelude to a Kiss (1938; arr. Timo Andres)
Philip Glass: Etude no. 20 (2012)
Recent Studio Albums with Timo Andres
Listen to our albums with Timo Andres, including 2013’s Home Stretch that earned producer David Frost a Grammy Award, and 2024’s The Blind Banister recorded with Grammy-winning producer, Silas Brown.
About Timo Andres
Composer and pianist Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
2023/24 highlights include a solo recital debut for Carnegie Hall, new commissions for the Moab Music Festival and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, a tour with the Calder Quartet including performances at San Francisco Performances and Chamber Music Albuquerque, and the world premiere of a piano concerto for Aaron Diehl at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by John Adams. Andres’s orchestrations and arrangements for Justin Peck’s new production of Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise, were premiered in a sold-out Summer 2023 run at The Fisher Center at Bard; the production has upcoming dates in Chicago, New York and elsewhere.
Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican by Andres and David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
As a pianist, Timo Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Metropolis Ensemble, among others. He has performed solo recitals for Lincoln Center, and Wigmore Hall. Collaborators include Becca Stevens, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel Kahane, Brad Mehldau, Nadia Sirota, and Philip Glass, who selected Andres as the recipient of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his performances on 2021’s The Arching Path, an album of music by Christopher Cerrone. Andres’s collaborations with Sufjan Stevens also include his May 2023 recording with Conor Hanick of Stevens’s latest album, Reflections; arrangements of ballets for New York City Ballet, and a solo piano album, The Decalogue.
A Nonesuch Records artist, Timo Andres has multiple solo albums on the label (with more set for upcoming release in 2024) and is featured as composer and pianist on the May 2020 release I Still Play, an album celebrating Robert Hurwitz. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School. More »
About Wethersfield Estate and Garden
The Wethersfield Estate, an acclaimed historical site situated in beautiful Dutchess County in New York’s Hudson Valley, encompasses a neo-Georgian manor house, formal garden, and carriage house museum. The Estate was the home property of Chauncey Stillman, grandson of James Stillman, Chairman of the National Bank, now known as CitiBank. The Wethersfield Foundation, which maintains and manages the Estate, focuses on access to the arts, culture and land conservation.
Nestled in 1000 acres of rolling hills in rural New York State, Wethersfield Estate and Garden provides visitors, visionaries, and artists, and an opportunity to reflect on the importance of natural and classical artistic beauty as a crucial means of human expression for our times. Wethersfield partners with the most promising emerging creative talents as they interpret classical visual, performing, and literary arts for the 21st century. More »
In December 2020, Metropolis Ensemble partnered with Wethersfield and Ballet Collective to present an immersive reimagining of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker created by Troy Schumacher with Metropolis artists Darian Donovan Thomas and Lauren Cauley. More »
About Metropolis Ensemble
Metropolis Ensemble is a Grammy-nominated nonprofit organization dedicated to commissioning and producing ambitious creative projects in contemporary music. With a particular focus on expanding opportunities for emerging professional musical creators and performers through collaboration, Metropolis partners with world-class musical artists and institutions to create, commission, and produce site-specific performances, new works, recordings, and digital experiences.
Pianist and composer Timo Andres is a fixture in the Metropolis community, from his new 2024 album, The Blind Banister, to solo confections like Small Wonder for cellist Ashley Bathgate and bold experiments like Mozart’s re-composed Coronation concerto from our 2013 studio album that earned producer David Frost a Grammy Award.
Founded by Grammy-nominated conductor Andrew Cyr in 2006, NYC-based Metropolis Ensemble gathers independent expert musicians for each project, inspiring audiences through the creation of new instrumentations and dynamic collaborations. More »