Timo Andres - The Blind Banister

The album comprises three works by Andres: the composer’s third piano concerto, The Blind Banister, with Andres as soloist, and Upstate Obscura for chamber orchestra and cello, with soloist Inbal Segev—both of which feature Metropolis Ensemble and conductor Andrew Cyr—and the solo piano piece Colorful History, also performed by the composer.

Andres makes his Carnegie Hall solo debut on February 23, performing, among other works, Etude No. 20 by Philip Glass, and the world premiere of his own new composition, Fiddlehead. The debut was originally scheduled for April 2020, as a performance of the pieces from the Nonesuch album I Still Play. When the pandemic halted it, Andres instead streamed the recital on YouTube. The Glass Etudes recently were published in a new box set folio that Andres co-edited, and he performs some of them on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.

The Blind Banister was written for pianist Jonathan Biss to be performed alongside Beethoven’s second concerto. Andres says, “My piece is not a pastiche or an exercise in palimpsest. It doesn’t quote or reference 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.” The piece was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.

Upstate Obscura takes its inspiration from American painter John Vanderlyn’s Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles. Andres says, “In taking on a quintessentially French subject, Vanderlyn somehow came up with something that feels American; it seems to regard Versailles at a bemused distance, with that characteristically American distrust of anything unnecessarily fanciful. My plan was to start with fragments of musical ornament from the French Baroque tradition—like loose chunks of masonry—and stretch them out until they no longer felt like ornaments ... The solo cello moves … just as a viewer might explore a virtual world—at times wandering, at times with purpose.”

Andres describes the album’s solo piano work: “Colorful History is a chaconne, stemming from a single augmented triad, and following the course of various directions it suggests. I think of this as a kind of extended metaphor for historical events, and how they echo each other without literally repeating.”