Timo Andres’ “Pithy” Program from SFP

Timo Andres playing his Pithy Program (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Today San Francisco Performances (SFP) released the second of the four video recordings of performances that are being uploaded to the Front Row Web site as part of the Front Row Premium Series. Both of the initial uploads presented solo performances by pianist Timo Andres lasting roughly 35 minutes in duration. Andres called this second video a Pithy Program, probably acknowledging the brevity of the twelve selections he offered. Equally interesting, however, was his decision to interleave jazz compositions by Alvin Singleton, Duke Ellington, and Roland Hanna among the works of François Couperin, John Adams, Robert Schumann, Francis Poulenc, Clara Schumann, and Meredith Monk. Furthermore, the entire program had a “spinal cord” of multiple works by the French composers, three by Couperin and two by Poulenc.

What may be most interesting about this program is that Andres made a case that, while Philip Glass may take credit for calling his approach to composition “repetitive structures,” a rhetorical backbone of repetition has been around far longer than Glass himself; and, in this particular program, it reaches all the way back to the eighteenth century of Couperin’s inventive keyboard compositions. (It is worth noting that Andres’ first Front Row Premium Series video, which was released on February 11, both began and ended with études by Glass.) Mind you, the operative word in “repetitive structures” is the second one! Mere repetition reduces structure to triviality, so performance becomes a matter of making a case for an overarching structure that goes beyond simple iteration.

Each of the composers Andres visited in his Pithy Program had his/her own way of unfolding that overarching structure. Unfortunately, Andres’ ability to disclose that unfolding through his execution of the scores was more variable than one would have wished. It probably was most evident in the works of the jazz composers, even if he was playing strictly notated charts rather than unfolding a repeated infrastructure through a series of improvisations. On the other hand, his approaches to Couperin often left the uneasy sense that he had not quite grasped the spirit of either repetition or structure. This was particularly evident at the beginning of the program, in which it seemed is if Andres had not quite grasped the “thematic spinal cord” that Couperin embedded in the rich polyphony of “Les baricades mistérieuses” from his sixth ordre, which begins the second of his four books of keyboard compositions.

Nevertheless, for the most part Andres was able to make his point about the relationship between repetition and structure, resulting in a relatively brief offering that was as engaging as it was informative.