Selected reviews of concerts and albums since 2022….
Daniele Sahr, Seen and Heard International
“Cheung has a unique ability to revitalize traditional compositional formats and ensemble structures, and his love of piano repertoire and its influence is refreshingly present. Moreover, his courage to write for instruments in a way that allows musicians to take their time to communicate with one another, to pair sounds and textures with clarity and to love their parts is truly reaching a zenith in this craft.”
Daniele Sahr, Seen and Heard International, August 2021
Paul Griffiths, disgwylfa
“It is all in the detail. Anthony Cheung has an intensely accurate sense of where his notes are going, and how and why. His music is so well made that it can give a friendly wave to jazz without falling flat on its face. It can even entice a quotation – from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of all things – to play new games. And its precision is responsible for a wealth of sonic magic.”
Paul Griffiths, disgwylfa (Record of the Week, March 2021)
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
“A delicate interplay of short motives in Cheung’s “The Real Book of Fake Tunes,” for flute and string quartet—Claire Chase joins the Spektral players on the recording—is akin to the contrapuntal games of the Schoenberg…The Spektral has accomplished the signal service of obliterating the dividing line between past and present, tradition and avant-garde; chronological barriers collapse, and the sounds roam free.”
Alex Ross, The New Yorker, November 2020
David Kettle, The Strad
Christian Carey, Sequenza 21
“Spektral is joined by flutist Claire Chase on Anthony Cheung’s Real Book of Fake Tunes, which combines all manner of effects for Chase with jazzy snips of melody and writing for quartet that is somewhat reminiscent of the techniques found in the Schoenberg, but with a less pervasively dissonant palette. Cheung’s writing for instruments is always elegantly wrought, and Chase and Spektral undertake an excellent collaboration. One could imagine an entire album for this quintet being an engaging listen.”
Christian Carey, Sequenza 21 (September 2020)
Jed Distler, Classics Today
"Anthony Cheung’s The Real Book of Fake Tunes amounts to a textural tour-de-force, where flutist Claire Chase’s amazing command of extended techniques assiduously integrate within the composer’s boundless gestural arsenal. The fourth movement in particular stands out for Cheung’s blending of pizzicato punctuations and sustained chording, and for the climactic cascading runs with instruments in all registers.”
Jed Distler, Classics Today, August 2020
Jeremy Smith, Music City Review
“In these tracks Spektral is joined by Brooklyn-based flautist Claire Chase. As stated, each movement of this piece has its own character, but the character revealed most is that of Anthony Cheung as a talented, inventive, and supremely original composer full of wit and charm.”
Jeremy Smith, Music City Review, August 2020
Elizabeth Nonemaker, The Baltimore Sun
“[The Bergamot Quartet and Claire Chase] performed Anthony Cheung’s “Real Book of Fake Tunes,” a collection of short pieces that are not exactly “tunes” in the traditional sense, but rather encourage performers — and audiences — to luxuriate in the shifting colors and textures of the instruments… Bergamot’s sound zipped up, radiating with an urgency to communicate something fascinating and rare.”
Pierre Rigaudière, Diapason
“Cheung has matured, the refinement of his writing illuminates discourse as form. If the Impressionist tendency of "The Real Book of Fake Tunes" (2015) can sometimes call to mind Debussy or Roussel (undoubtedly the alloy of the flute and the strings, here a quartet) and even Murail, it is thanks not only to the fluidity of the material, but especially to the circulation of its influx between the voices.”
Pierre Rigaudière, Diapason (5-star review of Cycles and Arrows, translated from French)
Jeremy Shatan, An Earful
Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News
Cheung’s concern with instrumental color follows naturally from his formation as a composer… One of the more adventurous instances is More Marginalia (2014) for a ten-piece ensemble… The ensemble’s unconventional makeup allows Cheung to set up shifting timbral alliances and oppositions between groups of instruments whose contrasting voices reflect contrasting traditions and playing techniques; especially effective are the contrasts between the plucked and bowed Chinese instruments on the one hand, and Western strings and winds on the other.
Peter Margasak, Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical
John Fleming, Musical America
Zoë Madonna, Boston Globe
On All thorn, but cousin to your rose: “Cheung’s piece was a metatextual monodrama commentary on translation and artistry, with [Jacob] Greenberg again anchoring a keyboard instrument (this time piano) and soprano Paulina Swierczek acting as the audience’s guide through layers of Nabokov, Google Translate, and Edgar Allan Poe.”
Zachary Lewis, The Plain Dealer
“‘Topos,’…straddled these two extremes with daunting magnificence...In four movements for large orchestra, Cheung took up the "Topos" ("Topics") of night music, "Storm and Stress," love, and hunting, in each case repurposing apt excerpts from the likes of Beethoven and Mahler as pigments in the musical equivalent of a freeform drip painting.”
Timothy Robson, Bachtrack
David Wright, New York Classical Review
“Composer Cheung…cheerfully acknowledged in a program note that his piece didn’t contain much in the way of “tunes.” But the influence of jazz could be detected in each of its five movements, from the swoopy strings under the stratospheric piccolo and violin phrases of the opening bars to the graceful swing and sway of the movement that followed..”
Dirk Wieschollek, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
“Dystemporal for 23 players (2012) presents turbulent sound textures with a bewildering simultaneity of difference, a wonderfully disturbed music. And SynchroniCities (2012) draws a rhapsodic abundance of heterogeneous thoughts, into which concrete sounds of various trips are incorporated…The field recordings from Cheung's trunks are not in the sense of “musique concrète,” cut into collage, but are either instrumentally transformed or just barely perceptible in the background. Not least, Cheung seeks out the hidden aesthetic qualities of real sounds beyond their cultural function, as acoustic artifacts. The Talea Ensemble, which Cheung himself co-founded and where he is an active pianist, performs brilliantly through the intercultural cosmos of Cheung's music.”
