Piano Concerto

For years I’ve carried on a constantly active text thread with my close friends, the composers Timo Andres and Christopher Cerrone. This thread was called “Lincolnshire Posse” for a while, and more recently “Flup,” after the European cleaning product discovered by Chris during his time in Switzerland; at any rate, this piece is a tribute to the two of them as musicians and as friends.

Although entirely abstract in its musical form and narrative, it gestures toward certain recognizable gestures patented by Chris and Timo, and the piano part was written specifically for Timo’s unique and extraordinary pianistic talents, his crisp attack, skill with repeated notes, and brilliantly clean flourishes and runs.

There are basically two kinds of concertos: solo versus orchestra, and solo with orchestra. This work is decidedly the latter. Sometimes the piano’s material sets off ideas in the orchestra, sometimes the orchestra triggers ideas in the piano, and sometimes they enact disparate material, but they always find common ground, and never act in opposition.

Although I do not believe music can ever be political, it can, perhaps, be philosophical, and so this concerto enacts a dialectic between the piano solo and the unusual orchestra consisting of flutes, clarinets, trombones, strings, and a very large percussion section including only tuned instruments. This unique ensemble serves, too, as an additional homage to Timo and Chris: to Timo’s sartorial love for the bespoke, and to Chris’s love for tuned percussion and general disdain toward brass.

Metaphorically, like many of my works, this Piano Concerto could be called geological: its structural stratigraphy consists of three constantly shifting, discrete layers, like the crust, mantle, and core, molten and constantly in motion, slow and fast strata tumbling simultaneously at separate, simultaneous rates.

The concerto is in one continuous movement, with a cadenza toward the end recapitulating and rethinking material from earlier in the piece, before we return to where we started and the natural cycle begins again.