Carnegie Hall presents a joint concert by Timo Andres and Gabriel Kahane-composers, performers, and long-time friends-on Thursday, April 7 at 7:30 p.m. in Zankel Hall. The program encompasses music from the past four centuries with vocal and piano works by J.S. Bach, Charles Ives, Benjamin Britten, Jerome Kern, Thomas Adès, and Andrew Norman, along with the New York premieres of new works the composers have written for each other. A pre-concert talk will be held in Zankel Hall with Kahane, Andres, and Jeremy Geffen, Director of Artistic Planning at Carnegie Hall.
"Timo and I are incredibly excited to bring the latest iteration of our 21st-century dueling pianos routine to Zankel Hall in April," says Kahane. "This program has evolved over the last five years as a living document of our musical friendship, and it is deeply satisfying to bringing back to New York for the first time since 2011, when we first performed together at the Ecstatic Music Festival."
The new works on the program were commissioned by
Carnegie Hall as part of its 125 Commissions Project, in which 125 new works will be performed over the next five seasons, in celebration of the Hall's 125th anniversary. Andres performs Works on Paper, a solo piano work written by Kahane, and Kahane performs Mirror Songs, written by Andres for voice and piano.
"My favorite songs use a combination of memorable materials and simple forms to convey unseen emotional depths," says Andres. "Andrea Cohen's poetry, with its combination of heartbreak and linguistic playfulness, was easy for me to hear in Gabe's voice, and the three Mirror Songs seemed almost to write themselves. I hope I've done justice to the one-man-band that is
Gabriel Kahane."
Timo Andres is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut, studied at Yale University, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. A Nonesuch Records artist, his newest album of orchestral works, Home Stretch, has been hailed for its playful intelligence and individuality, and his 2010 debut album for two pianos, Shy and Mighty, received widespread critical acclaim from music journalists, listeners, and fellow artists.
In 2015-2016, Andres's new works included a new piano concerto for Jonathan Biss and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and a string quartet for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by
Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series. He tours with fellow composer / performer
Gabriel Kahane, with performances at
Carnegie Hall, the Newman Center in Denver, the Schubert Club in St. Paul, and UNC-Chapel Hill, and with
Philip Glass, joining the composer in performances of Glass's complete piano Etudes, with dates in Mexico City and Chicago. These follow 2014-2015 performances with Glass at Brooklyn's BAM, San Francisco Performances, the National Concert Hall in Dublin and London's
Barbican Centre.
Other recent highlights include commissions from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and a new piano quintet for Jonathan Biss and the Elias String Quartet, for a commission consortium including
Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, and San Francisco Performances.
As a pianist, Andres has performed solo recitals for Lincoln Center, Wigmore Hall, the Phillips Collection, (le) Poisson Rouge, and San Francisco Performances. He appeared at the 2014 Ojai Festival with the Knights Chamber Orchestra and performed Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the North Carolina Symphony in January and May 2015.
Andres frequently performs with the new music ensemble ACME and is one-sixth of the Sleeping Giant composers' collective.
Over the last decade,
Gabriel Kahane has quietly established himself as one of the leading exponents of American song, grafting a deep interest in character and narrative to a keen sense of harmony and rhythm. On the heels of his major label debut, The Ambassador, hailed by Rolling Stone as "one of the year's very best albums", Kahane now celebrates the release of his fifth LP, The Fiction Issue, an album comprising three chamber works performed by string quartet Brooklyn Rider, with vocal appearances by Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and Kahane himself.
Kahane has collaborated with a diverse array of artists, including Sufjan Stevens, Blake Mills, and Chris Thile, front-man of Punch Brothers, for whom Kahane opened forty concerts in the US last year. In addition to the performance with Andres at Zankel Hall, this season finds Kahane on tour with Brooklyn Rider in support of The Fiction Issue. In March, he makes his European debut with concerts at Kings Place in London, the Paris Philharmonie, and the Finnish National Theater in Helsinki, among others.
As a composer increasingly known to mine his songs for material in larger-scale works, Kahane has been commissioned by, among others, the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with whom he toured in the spring of 2013, performing Gabriel's Guide to the 48 States, an hour-long cycle on texts from the WPA American Guide Series. He has written three works for the 2016
New York Philharmonic Biennial, to be performed by the Interlochen Academy Orchestra, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, San Francisco Girls Chorus, and violinist Jennifer Koh.
An avid theater artist, Kahane starred at BAM in the critically-lauded stage version of The Ambassador, directed by Tony Award winner
John Tiffany. That production was also presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA and by Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Kahane has been an artist-in-residence since 2014. He is also the composer-lyricist of the musical February House, which was premiered in 2012 at the Public Theater, for which Kahane is currently writing a new evening-length musical theater work.
A graduate of Brown University and two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, Kahane lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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