“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.
In this collection of ensemble and chamber pieces, all from 2013-15, the jazz flavour comes across most cheerfully in Assumed Roles, a kind of unconcerto for viola, when a family of springing motifs gradually comes to take over from a four-note pattern that has monopolized the music a while. And the ending of this piece, a long descent shadowing Mahler, again shows how, when Cheung reflects on something, the image remains firmly embedded in his own mirror…
All through, too, creative awareness lends a light in which the music reveals itself, beautifully. Yet one piece retains its even more beguiling mystery: Time’s Vestiges, for nine players. This, in twelve minutes or so, irregularly, executes a sweep from low to high – an arrow of time, within which there are many smaller arrows, cycles, and cycles on cycles. At the beginning, soloists take turns with a four-note shape not unrelated to that of Assumed Roles. Time is slow and sticky here, and the instruments need effort to extricate themselves. There follows a sequence of episodes gradually taking over from one another: an imaginary ocean of wavelets and sprays, a multi-instrument staccato pattering, a wonderful horn solo, and finally a crushed harmony of retuned strings in continuous ascent as the piano takes steps in the same direction. Haunting and memorable…”
Paul Griffiths, disgwylfa, March 2021 (review of Cycles and Arrows, Record of the Week)