Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times

"All composers are interested in sound, but Anthony Cheung more than most. His orchestral work “Fog Mobiles” (2010) has its horn soloist create tones that suggest foghorns heard from various distances. “Lyra,” first performed last week by the New York Philharmonic, calls for shimmering transitions between a live ensemble and taped music.

Pressing beyond the standard tuning of the piano, Mr. Cheung made another investigation of sound at the Stone on Tuesday, when he appeared not as a composer but also as an instrumentalist and impresario...

He is an alert, cool pianist, and played with focus and clarity in four works that were separated by the five movements of Ben Johnston’s Suite for Microtonal Piano (1978), written for an instrument in which each note is precisely tuned to match the overtones of C. Envisioned for a retuned acoustic piano, the piece was played by Mr. Cheung, for logistics’ sake, on an electronic keyboard... (He demonstrated the different tunings by playing the opening of Debussy’s “L’Isle Joyeuse” on each instrument.) The keyboard was inevitably a bit tinny, but the brilliant creativity of the suite came through, from the sweeping opening Alarum to the fifth-movement Toccata, its sweet Copland-style Americana tinged with sour notes.

Mr. Cheung savvily preceded that Toccata with Copland’s Piano Variations, much thornier than, say, “Appalachian Spring,” but authoritative whether granitic or gentle. The grand flourishes and frosty, insistent dissonances of Ana Sokolovic’s “Prelude and Fugue for GG” (2007) were inspired by the pianist Glenn Gould, and Alvin Curran’s 1990 arrangement of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” had the bass line and melody emerge out of glacial slowness. Bernard Rands’s two recent Impromptus crackled with jumpy energy."