Concert: Take Five

Major works for piano and string quartet by Timo Andres (in photo), a Finalist for 2016’s Pulitzer Prize in Music, and Lowell Liebermann, one of the most frequently-performed American composers. Andres describes his Piano Quintet as a “sort of thought-experiment” inspired by one of his “long-time favorite pieces,” the great Piano Quintet by Robert Schumann; based on a simple, four-note melodic motif “stolen” from Schumann, Andres built “a single, large-scale form constructed out of several simpler” components. Liebermann’s epic Quintet for Piano and Strings revels in the gestures and rhetoric of a rich, flamboyant neo-Romanticism, creating a ferocious, swashbuckling work that is, in turn, eerie, serene, off-kilter, and blazingly virtuosic.