It’s hard to deny the overall effect of this strange, smartly conceived album.
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The Roots have total command of their combination of jazz-influenced hip-hop and social awareness.
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.
Dreamscapes is magnificent with virtuosic performances… a spectacular sounding disc… by one of today’s most eclectic composers.
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.
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
The two concertos were recorded at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall by Charlie Post and Tim Martyn with a “you-are-there” feeling.
The opening Violin Concerto is a good introduction to Fung, offering an immediate vista of her understated but brilliant orchestration and her technically demanding but musically riveting writing for the violin.
This, easily, one of the most unusual piano concertos you will ever hear but, I think, the strongest work in this collection and completely fascinating. The fact that she is, clearly, a very creative and skilled composer is all I need to recommend this without hesitation.
Vivian Fung’s Dreamscapes is a cutting-edge album in the best sense, an invigorating indication of where we are in classical music.
Exciting, skilfully put together music with many exoticisms.
“What sets Fung apart is her ability to take over the subconscious of the listener, to build a world so captivating that even the strangest of transitions happen seamlessly. “
“The year-old Violin Concerto that leads off the disc boasts a certain winsome charm, especially in the fluid performance of soloist Kristin Lee.”
At every point in the disc, Fung has a strong sense of thematic control and structural overview that suggests more great things to come.
Here at last is music of dramatic urgency and depth, in which Fung draws on ideas from gamelan while also adding plenty of her own original material - clangorous, dissonant harmonies, off-kilter rhythms and a sense of wild unpredictability.
All three of the works presented here are based on gamelan motifs and melodies giving the disc a wonderful continuity.