orchestra21

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.

Forget the flash mobs, this project promoting Esa-Pekka Salonen’s residency in Dortmund, Germany is a truly next-level effort to take ‘music out of the concert hall and put it right on the street’:

Twelve tireless musicians played for 24 hours in a row 21,600 bars and 86,400 individual notes from a custom-composed score on a stage in the heart of Dortmund.

Effective, too – the orchestra’s first set of concerts with Salonen sold out.

Composer and pianist Timo Andres, reporting on his experience with the WCFSO last week. We are of course happy to oblige – not to mention proud to demonstrate once again that a regional orchestra can indeed illuminate the way forward for its larger, copiously-funded metropolitan brethren.

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]

Jerry was the orchestra director at my high school in California and one of the coolest teachers I’ve ever had. Now that he is retired and happily free of the mania we upstart musicians brought upon him he’s getting around to recording several of his symphonic works.

One of the pieces slated for taping, American Journey, was among the first things I ever conducted and offered me a formative experience in preparing a contemporary score alongside its composer. As a result I have insider knowledge of just how much this project could use your support – that early performance commenced with the orchestra falling apart and most definitely did not leave Jerry with much of a reference recording!

[Ancillary lessons: Successful conducting careers can emerge from inauspicious beginnings, and composers – especially if they are your mentors – may be willing to talk to you even after you butcher their work onstage.]