orchestra21

GPOYW Composer collabo EDITION

[Onstage with Timo Andres, photo by Eric Clausen]

Timo Andres – Bathtub Shrine
WCFSO – February 2012

Here is the second-ever performance of Timo Andres’ 2009 elegy for orchestra, Bathtub Shrine. The work was originally composed for the Yale Symphony, a group whose ‘camaraderie and fierce playing’ Timo and I were fortunate enough to experience first hand during our respective stays in New Haven. More from the composer:

When the YSO asked me to write a piece in memory of one of their past conductors, I knew I wanted to write for the hall that the orchestra has struggled with and triumphed in for some 40 years. Yale’s Woolsey Hall is a peculiar acoustic environment; its high ceiling, shallow stage, and hard, non-porous surfaces create a staggering 13-second reverberation, flattering some sounds and completely overwhelming others [the mighty Newberry organ sounds fantastic; anything fast or staccato, not so much]. The effect is that of a giant bathroom.

I vividly remember how surreal and unusual a space Woolsey was for performing with orchestra, and enjoyed going back in time – and place – as I got to know Timo’s piece.

Timo Andres followed up his re-invention of Mozart K537 on Saturday with an arrangement of Mahler’s Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. I thought it was a fabulous choice and, like everything Timo does, beautifully executed.

Anyone who has been following the WCFSO for the past several years may recall experiencing some of the same music on our stage [or on Iowa Public TV] in the alternate version Mahler conceived for the third movement of his Second Symphony.

Iowa: Are you ready for the new normal?

Discover it tomorrow when Timo Andres joins us at WCFSO to present his unique version of Mozart’s twenty-sixth piano concerto, in which soloist and composer are rejoined just as they were when Mozart first played the piece in 1789.

[Read more about Andres’ approach and see his performance of the work here]

Mozart performed his twenty-sixth piano concerto twice in 1789-90 and as was his custom [especially in piano works conceived for himself] he improvised extensively, particularly in the left hand. Now composer and pianist Timo Andres inherits Mozart’s mantle, but with a twenty-first century twist. As Timo explains his re-imagining of K537 fills in the many incomplete sections of Mozart’s manuscript with entirely contemporary material:

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 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].

At the end of last year Andres and his colleagues from the impressive Metropolis Ensemble performed K537 at Angel Orensanz Center in NYC as an encore to their 2010 premiere of the work; the first movement from that reading is above. Timo arrives in Iowa today to begin rehearsals of the piece with the WCFSO ahead of our collaboration on Saturday night.

[Other movements from the Metropolis performance are here]