Composer and pianist Timo Andres will be making two appearances in San Francisco Performances’ PIVOT series this week: tomorrow night he’ll provide accompaniment for one of the selections in the L.A. Dance Project’s sold-out opening performance. Then on Friday he’ll play a complete solo recital, also at A.C.T.’s Strand Theater, and he’ll be back in the Bay Area early in February for a conversation with the Kronos Quartet about playing the music of Philip Glass.
There’s more information about the concerts at the San Francisco Performances website.
“The solo recital kind of started with two pieces,” Andres says. “The Janacek, On an Overgrown Path, which I kind of got into a couple of years ago, and wanted to find a way to structure a recital around that. And then also Chris[topher Cerrone]’s piece, “The Arching Path.” Other than the fact that they have obviously related titles, I knew that I wanted to have a chance to learn Chris’s piece, which is sort of a larger solo piano work.” One could say his composition and piano playing go hand in hand. “The two have always been so intertwined for me, I almost don’t even think of them as being different things. Though of course performing is kind of its own form of discipline. They’re so inseparable for me, I don’t think I would be able to do one without doing the other, because I get so many compositional ideas from hands-on experience with music. Not just playing music, but really working on it over and over and over for a long period of time.”
