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Composed for pianist Min Kwon as a reaction to her prompt to write a variation on the Samuel Augustus Ward tune America the Beautiful, American Coda is an intervallic treatment of that theme, and attempts to find beauty in decline.
Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican by Andres and David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
As a pianist, Timo Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Albany Symphony, New World Symphony, and in many collaborations with Andrew Cyr and Metropolis Ensemble. He has performed solo recitals for Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, San Francisco Performances, the Phillips Collection, and (le) Poisson Rouge. Collaborators include Becca Stevens, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel Kahane, Brad Mehldau, Nadia Sirota, the Kronos Quartet, John Adams, and Philip Glass, with whom he has performed the complete Glass Etudes around the world, and who selected Andres as the recipient of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize. Andres also frequently works with Sufjan Stevens; his arrangements of Stevens’s ballet, Principia, were presented last season by the New York City Ballet, and his recording of Stevens’s newest album, The Decalogue, has received widespread acclaim.
Other recent projects include a new work for the Calder Quartet through the LA Phil, premiered at Noon to Midnight; a major choral-orchestral work for the Orchester Cottbus Staatstheater, Land Mass; and dates at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Neue Galerie, and the Big Ears Festival with vocalist Theo Bleckmann.
In 2019/20, Andres curated (and performed in) “American Perspective,” a concert with the Cincinnati Symphony, André de Ridder, Dance Heginbotham, and Inbal Segev, playing his cello concerto, Upstate Obscura. He was slated to make his recital debut for Carnegie Hall – but after a Covid-19 cancellation, he created a bespoke YouTube playlist exploring the program (which included works by John Adams, Philip Glass, Brad Mehldau, Laurie Anderson, himself, and a new commission from Gabriella Smith, et al).
A Nonesuch Records artist, Timo Andres is featured as composer and pianist on the May 2020 release I Still Play, an album comprising a set of piano pieces written by himself and fellow Nonesuch artists for Chairman Emeritus Bob Hurwitz. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School.
www.andres.com
As the artistic director of Center for Musical Excellence, I am always on the look out for new and undiscovered talents. They come to me, sometimes, by my colleagues’ recommendations and other times through young artists’ own research about our organization. Tyson Davis and Andrew Bambridge are currently on our roster of CME Young Artists, whom we mentor. Patricio Molina is a CME alumnus. Theo Chandler, Ji-Young Ko, and Daniel Newman-Lessler applied for our Grant program, and I got to know their work through that process. I decide on young artists when I notice a deep passion and drive within them, plus a certain kind of sparkle in the personality and lots of humility. In addition to musical talents, I believe these are the qualities that will take the young artists far. CME’s motto is "Moving Musicians Forward". I’ve chosen our Discovery Composers based on these qualities, whom we felt we could easily move forward.
- Min Kwon