When Timo Andres made his debut full-length recording for Nonesuch in 2009, with the two-piano set Shy and Mighty, most of the talk focused on how it seemed to announce a genuine young composer of interest. Less mentioned was Andres’s own monstrous technique, yet Andres is not so much a great composer with sufficient piano skills as a pure double threat. That’s going to be harder to ignore, starting with Home Stretch: For this follow-up, Andres has taken on Mozart’s “Coronation” piano concerto, along with a few new compositions of his own. Well: Make that one brand-new composition, and two halvsies.

For example, Andres’s “Coronation” is a “co-composition,” which takes the infamously unfinished left-hand piano part of Wolfgang’s and completes it with a 21st-century American, post-minimalist flair. Andres humbly calls his rumbling additions (mostly found in the left-hand part) a “bastardization” of the Mozart style, but more often than not, his crunchy dissonances and harmonic detours bear some relationship to the master’s roadmap. And the performance, undertaken with the Metropolis ensemble, has a flowing, unified feel. It’s the rare “based on” item that feels impishly creative while remaining sufficiently reverent.

The other two “originals” on this program are strong, too. “Home Stretch,”… read more »