The Metropolis Ensemble community is delighted to congratulate our good friend Timo Andres on being named Pulitzer Prize finalist in the music category for “The Blind Banister”, a piano quintet written for Jonathan Bliss. This three-movement piece inspired by Beethoven takes listeners on a beautiful quest in which they rise and fall with the music’s ascending and descending scales. (Pulitzer.org)
Andres has been a close collaborator with Metropolis Ensemble since 2009. In 2013, Metropolis Ensemble’s studio album Home Stretch, released on Nonesuch Records, paired the title work with two Metropolis-commissioned works from Andres: a recomposition of Mozart’s “Coronation” Piano Concerto and “Paraphrase on Themes by Brian Eno”.
Stay tuned for exciting news about future plans for next season with Timo Andres and Metropolis…
About The Blind Banister
Like when the light goes out on the stairs and the hand follows—with confidence—the blind banister that finds its way in the darkness.
Andres’ concerto, which debuted in Saint Paul, Minnesota in November 2015, is the first concerto of pianist Jonathan Biss’ latest Beethoven project, Beethoven/5, for which the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has commissioned five composers to write new piano concertos, each inspired by one of Beethoven’s five piano concertos.
Andres describes his piece saying, " Beethoven gave his early second piano concerto (‘not one of my best’, in his own estimation) a kind of renovation in the form of a new cadenza, 20 years down the line (around the time he was working on the Emperor concerto). It’s wonderfully jarring in that he makes no concessions to his earlier style; for a couple of minutes, we’re plucked from a world of conventional gestures into a future-world of obsessive fugues and spiraling modulations. Like any good cadenza, it’s made from those same simple gestures—an arpeggiated triad, a sequence of downward scales—but uses them as the basis for a miniature fantasia.
“My third piano concerto, 'The Blind Banister,' is a whole piece built over this fault line in Beethoven’s second, trying to peer into the gap. I tried as much as possible to start with those same extremely simple elements Beethoven uses; however, my piece is not a pastiche or an exercise in palimpsest. It doesn’t even directly quote Beethoven. There are some surface similarities to his concerto (a three-movement structure, a B-flat tonal center) but these are mostly red herrings. The best way I can describe my approach to writing the piece is: I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven’s concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out.”