Timothy Andres is featured in the latest entry in the "Composer Portals" series from Q2 Music, the online new-music station from New York City's classical music station WQXR. The series takes a deeper look at the music heard on the station, offering exclusive audio introductions to the pieces from the composers themselves. The clips, says Q2 Music, are part of its effort toward "enshrining the insights and wisdom of today's composers."

In the new entry, titled "The Witty and Reverent Musical World of Timothy Andres," the composer introduces nine of his pieces, including five from his debut album, Shy and Mighty—Antennae, Die Spieluhr, How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas, Tunnel, and Trip by Train—released in 2010 on Nonesuch Records.

Introducing the "Composer Portal" for Q2 Music, writer Seth Colter Walls finds that the title of Andres's debut album, Shy and Mighty, is an aptly chosen one.

"Andres's apparent reverence for—and appropriate shyness in the presence of—the old masters in no way precludes a bold, muscular sense of play," writes Colter Walls: "even his quotations of Beethoven and Chopin, which come during Ideas, manage to function in a manner akin to needle-drops in hip-hop. Meantime, while some of Andres’s harmonic and rhythmic patterns harken back to the early John Adams pieces for piano, others suggest knottier, more pointillistic writing, like that of Ligeti’s."

Colter Walls concludes that "Andres is doing contemporary classical music a service by forswearing the old-school composer’s aura—that of a tortured mystic laboring at his work. He’s witty, conversational and seemingly secure enough in his talents to trust that we won’t mistake his good humor for a lack of seriousness."

Read more from Seth Colter Walls and hear what Andres has to say at wqxr.org.

Timothy Andres will be accompanying soprano Mellissa Hughes at Amherst College's Buckley Recital Hall tomorrow night in a concert of music by Jacob Cooper and Gabe Kahane, his own Family Plays, and Amherst undergraduate composers. He joins NOW Ensemble at BAM Café in Brooklyn on May 4, the Brad Mehldau Trio at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts in Denver on May 11, and offers his own recital at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York on May 29. Andres makes his London debut in a concert at Wigmore Hall on June 8, launching the venue's latest summer Late Night series. For additional details and ticket links, go to nonesuch.com/on-tour.