TIMO ANDRES METROPOLIS ENSEmBLE MEtROPOLIS ENSEMBLE Owen Dalby, Amalia Hall, Sheryl Hwangbo, Siwoo Kim, Kristin Lee, Sean Lee (Concertmaster), Miho Saegusa, Emily Smith, Elly Suh, Emma Sutton, Tema Watstein, violin HOME StREtCH David Auerbach, Phil Kramp, Eric Nowlin, viola Na-Young Baek, Ashley Bathgate, Hiro Matsuo, cello 1. Home Stretch 18:14 Rachel Calin, Evan Premo, bass Lance Suzuki, flute Mozart Coronation Concerto Recomposition Carl Oswald, James Austin Smith, oboe Rebekah Heller, Adrian Morejon, bassoon 2. I. Allegro 14:56 Danielle Rose Kuhlmann, Leelanee Sterrett, french horn 3. II. Larghetto 7:56 Jeff Missal, Paul Murphy, trumpet 4. III. Allegretto 12:38 Conor Hanick, piano (Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno) Britton Matthews, percussion 5. Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno 14:14 Andrew Cyr, conductor and artistic director Timo Andres, piano Metropolis Ensemble Andrew Cyr, conductor rhythmic control,” says Andres, “and great control of dynamics. They’re not the things you think of when you think of a virtuoso pianist, but they’re things that can support a virtuoso performance in a really compelling way.” The situation of the piano part relative to the orchestra also strives toward something more nuanced than the conventional soloist/accompaniment rela- tionship. “The piano doesn’t even really lead” in Home Stretch, says Andres. “Either it’s on equal footing with the orchestra, or it’s following and kind of LEaDING UP to the composition of Home Stretch, a piano commenting on what the orchestra’s doing,” as in a piece of chamber music. concerto he wrote as a Yale student, Timo Andres—already a highly skilled Andres thought of the piece “more in chamber terms, as I was writing it. pianist as well as a composer—had become disenchanted with the sort of Chamber music is sort of my home base—it’s what I love most about playing superficially flattering music usually written by virtuosos of the keyboard. At and experiencing music.” first, Andres says, he responded with a handful of what he called “anti-virtuo- As a nod to the original soloist, a fan of high-performance cars, Andres sic” works with deliberately simple piano parts. But when presented with the structured the piece as a sort of medium-length ride in a gradually accelerat- challenge of writing a concerto for his friend David Kaplan’s degree recital, ing machine (to paraphrase John Adams). Rather than the Mozartean fast- Andres, rather than dismiss, or reject outright, the virtuoso tendencies of the slow-fast of the traditional concerto, he wrote the work in three continuous concerto tradition, arrived at a novel solution. sections, doubling the tempo with each successive movement. Andres achieves Borrowing a technique he’d encountered in the music of Hungarian avant- his discreet accelerando with a gradual stepping-up of those layered tempi, gardist György Ligeti, he wrote a piece layering multiple tempi, one on top like the background and foreground scenery rushing past out a car’s side of the other simultaneously, to create a solo part of deceptive simplicity. In window. Familiar phrases make a fleeting return, reframed by new material as Home Stretch, Andres points out, “you have to create the illusion that you’re if now glimpsed in the rear-view mirror. in your own timescale” relative to the orchestra, and the result is a concerto The piece reaches its finish line not with a fanfare, but with an ambigu- that challenges the soloist not due to the density or speed of the writing, but ous, seemingly offhand restatement of the opening theme. As it turns out, for subtler and, arguably, more musically substantive reasons. the “home stretch” of the title has a few different meanings: In addition to “It’s particularly interesting to me when I hear a pianist who has great suggesting the last leg of that imaginary drive—and punning on the layered rhythms’ dilation and contraction of musical time—it also refers to the home the expected harmonic treatment, Andres’s left hand frequently wanders off stretch of Andres and Kaplan’s student careers, and the end of the reassuring to the wrong note, or finds itself on the right note by taking the wrong route certainty that came with a life sheltered within ivied walls. entirely. Harmonies that ought to be stable instead slide and wobble, and What do we do in the world, Andres was asking himself, once the struc- Andres strolls blithely into the resolutions that Mozartean style would have ture of academia is gone? At the premiere performance, both the composer stuck like a gymnastic dismount. and the dedicatee found themselves racing forward into the unknown, with The effect is at times grotesque or even comical, such as when the left both the exhilaration and the trepidation that implies. hand injects harsh and abrupt dissonances into Mozart’s elegant concerto, and at times surprisingly lovely, as in the bittersweet harmonies Andres gives ThE PRaCtICaL circumstances of that premiere also contribute something to the second movement’s opening theme. The cadenzas are even freer: In the to the “chamber” character of Home Stretch. Andres originally composed last movement, Andres atomizes a motif completely before rebuilding it into the work to be performed alongside a Mozart concerto, No. 12 (K. 414), and something like a jazz vamp. Throughout, he subjects Mozart’s material to so in orchestrating his own piece, Andres restricted himself to the chamber- transformations the master could never have imagined, borrowing techniques orchestra forces available for Mozart’s: woodwinds, strings, and two horns, from the centuries of piano music that have intervened between the Classical plus a pair of bassoons that don’t appear in the Mozart score. era and our own. Two years later, Andres found himself in dialogue with Mozart once more. What distinguishes Andres’s completion of the Coronation concerto from Andrew Cyr, conductor and artistic director of Brooklyn’s Metropolis similar experiments in polystylism—for instance, Alfred Schnittke’s obses- Ensemble, approached Andres with the idea of “completing” Mozart’s score sively allusive, decidedly un-Beethovenian cadenzas for the Beethoven Violin for the Coronation Piano Concerto, No. 26 (K. 537), for which the composer Concerto—is the lack of anxiety that Andres brings to the exercise. His never wrote down his own cadenzas, or even most of the left-hand part. completion, however irreverent, is neither a show of disdain for the past, Andres was familiar with the cadenzas Béla Bartók wrote for the Mozart nor an oedipal grappling with his historical forbears. He admires Mozart; he Concerto for Two Pianos (K. 365), and their unorthodox character inspired doesn’t worship him. his approach to filling in the blank spaces in the Coronation manuscript with Ligeti once lamented, in discussing the difficulty of finding one’s own style music of his own. in the late 20th century, “I am in a prison: One wall is the avant-garde, the While most pianists work from a completion of the score that sketches in other wall is the past, and I want to escape.” Timo Andres suffers from no such anxiety, no angst about the death of tonality or the irretrievability of lost “Spirits Drifting,” and “By This River.” aesthetics. Andres has ready access to past and future alike. Paraphrase’s inclusion on this disc brings the program full circle, making clear the debt that Andres’s original compositions owe to Eno’s songwriting For Andres’s teachers and their peers, the post-Ligeti generation who vocabulary. For the tranquility of Home Stretch’s opening section, for in- spent much of their careers struggling to liberate today’s young compos- stance, Andres drew so directly on Eno—those high chimes disappearing into ers from that sort of anxiety, the music of Brian Eno represented one way the sonic distance like an electronic echo-delay, the luxurious spacing between out. Because Eno approached composition not from a background in music those ethereal upper voices and the warm chordal accompaniment—that theory, but from art school and, later, the rock world, his embrace of the certain measures could be mistaken for harmonically distorted quotations of experimental ethos advanced by composers like John Cage was free of any Paraphrase (in this instance, of “By This River”). imperatives to reject traditional harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic materials, One reason Andres included the reworkings of Eno and Mozart on this so that even his most imaginative forms were built out of warm and ap- record is to offer context for his own concerto; while Home Stretch the piece proachable stuff. serves as an intimate portrait of the young composer hurtling forward into “It was very freeing,” Andres says of discovering Eno’s approach to form the unknown, Home Stretch the album sketches out a wider picture of the on ambient recordings like Music for Airports, but it was Eno’s harmonic composer engaging with musical influences from the past and the present. sensibility that he ultimately found most appealing, a sensibility that extends Whether looking back at the Mozartean chamber orchestra through the lens even to Eno’s most straightforward pop albums. “I could immediately sense a of Eno’s electronic soundscapes, or gazing forward into the world of futuristic sort of kindred spirit: These are the right notes, sounding at the right time.” pop from a firm perch in the classical tradition, it feels like home. Commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble as a companion piece to Home Stretch, Andres’s Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno is, aside from an —Daniel Stephen Johnson opening quotation of Eno’s ambient composition “Stars,” an orchestration of May, 2013 songs from Eno’s rock albums, meant to treat the songs the way Franz Liszt interwove music from Italian operas into his Réminiscences for solo piano.