Timo Andres

photo by Michael Wilson

Timo Andres 🔊 (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY. A Nonesuch Records artist, his album of orchestral works, Home Stretch, has been hailed for its “playful intelligence and individuality,” (The Guardian) and of his 2010 debut album for two pianos Shy and Mighty (performed by himself and duo partner David Kaplan), Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that “it achieves an unhurried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene… more mighty than shy, [Andres] sounds like himself.”

Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony with Andris Nelsons; Strong Language, a string quartet 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 and premiered at the Barbican with Andres and pianist David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a piano concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

As a pianist, Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Britten Sinfonia, 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, Chris Thile, the Kronos Quartet, John Adams, and Philip Glass, with whom he has performed the complete Piano 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 recording of Stevens’s solo piano album, The Decalogue, has received widespread acclaim, and a new album is forthcoming in 2022. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his performances on 2021’s The Arching Path, an album of music by Christopher Cerrone.

During the “quiet” season of 2020–21, Andres built an impressive library of music films on YouTube, featuring a deep range of repertoire which he performed, recorded, engineered, directed, and edited from home.

In the summer of 2021, Andres was presented in two concerts by San Francisco Performances, including a chamber music concert with Jennifer Koh and Jay Campbell, and a solo recital. He was a 2021 Ojai Music Festival Artist, where he performed both a solo recital and Ingram Marshall’s Flow with John Adams and the OMF Orchestra (on a program with his own Running Theme). 21–22 also includes the premiere of a new composition for concert:nova (Communal Effort), solo works for cellist Johannes Moser (Ogee) and pianist Adam Tendler (An Open Book); and a piece for the Myriad Trio (Precise Sentiments).

A Nonesuch Records artist, Andres is featured as composer and pianist on the May 2020 release I Still Play, an album celebrating Robert Hurwitz. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School.