“San Francisco-born composer Anthony Cheung’s Respire: Piano Concerto No. 2 was performed by the ever intrepid new music voyager Gloria Cheng. It started simply but soon became an impressionistic wash with rippling upward scales from the piano. Gradually, things got busier and stranger, with microtones creeping into the texture as the piano somewhat receded from the spotlight and a Nord synthesizer, played by Mark Robson and detuned to as many as eight different scales, filled out the sound. As Cheng’s touch turned ever more exquisite, the overall texture became slipperier, all abstract color.
Eventually, Cheng stopped playing for a bit. Over the audio system, a 1926 recording of the great pianist Alfred Cortot playing Chopin’s sometimes tonally-ambiguous Prelude in A Minor played among the live microtones. It was not so much a ghostly apparition as it was a sound-warping experience. Everything came to an Ivesian cacophony at the close of the finale. All of that in a traditional concerto format and length, suggesting there are still new things to be squeezed out of the old templates.”
Richard Ginell, San Francisco Classical Voice, February 10, 2026
“With a sophisticated harnessing of imagination, the echoing of tenses wove memories, stories, imagery and perspectives from the readings on the stage (and, in some cases, voice recordings such as Ocean Vuong’s work ‘The Gift’) with a cleanly constructed collage of sounds… Cheung’s complex work was executed with seeming effortlessness, thanks to the strong relationship among the musicians.. Without question, the echoing of tenses is another one of Cheung’s elegant approaches to composition and, most certainly, he created ‘new nerve endings’ for anyone lucky enough to hear the work.”
Daniele Sahr, Seen and Heard International, July 24, 2025
“Each time I’ve heard Anthony Cheung, as pianist or composer, I’ve been absolutely stunned by his invention, his lucidity, his seriousness and originality. Last night, for the final performance of this summer’s American Modern Opera Company, this originality was not only in music but the most singular form.”
Harry Rolnick, ConcertoNet, July 2025
“Twice Removed (2024) by Anthony Cheung rewarded a first listen while inviting a second and third with the teasing promise of recognisable but fast-dissolving pictures and narratives.”
Peter Quantrill, The Strad, May 23, 2025
“Cheung’s pulsate, fixate…incorporates several musical kernels into single sounding trajectory of concentric cycles of development, calling forth seamless virtuosity and reactivity from its performer…The music takes shape sky-high, in flickering two-note patterns, their semitones alternating with pizzicato-like eight notes and airy quintuplets in lower registers. Once underway, the core patterns are subjected to an inner dialogue of constant permutation of rapid juxtapositions, organic fusion and great many twists and turns, lending the music with captivating aura. True to its title, as pulsate, fixate unfolds, its looped development evokes the sensation of an aural spiral, its highways and byways examining the instrument’s colorist potential in fine-tuned detail. Out of the root material, more extended lines emerge, as the soloist enters into a game of staccato bursts and various scalar patters, ornamented with key-clicks and overblow effects. As the pace mounts, cascades of triplet and sextuplet groupings dance away until the music comes full circle. The final measures hark back to the opening gestures, now echoed in fragments and leading to a rising quintuplet roundoff. Given in a reading of sensuous agility by Mindy Kaufman, pulsate, fixate was awash with detailed virtuosity, the performance embracing the textural poetry of the music with clarity and focus.”
Jari Kallio, Adventures in Music, November 20, 2024
“…Cheung’s intensely colourful, exquisitely wrought ensemble-writing lets us imagine [musical illustrations of closed captions]. Rattles and scrapes on woodblocks segue into chiming triangle and into microtonal high winds: there is dazzling control across the instrumental gamut (with equally dazzling performances throughout the album). Restraint is key: Cheung rarely over-eggs the material, framing with silence the sound heard, be it the faint click-clacking of a clarinet’s keys or the buzzing decay of an overplucked harp. Eventually, the contrasting episodes morph into a more continuous texture of swelling, quasi-spectral rising and falling scales. The instrumental variety gives The Natural Word the character of a concerto for orchestra… Alluding to the wire-mesh sculptures of artist Ruth Asawa, Cheung’s piano concerto A line can go anywhere explores the piano as a wired mechanical box. Slow microtonal descents are a recurring motif, staggered across instruments, and a just-intonation Rhodes keyboard adds colour. The first movement presents an opening cell gradually becoming more complex, like wire unfurling, the opening staccato and pizzicato flourishes eventually leading to dense microtonal textures. In the quieter second movement, dense passages transition to and from bare ones imperceptibly. In the thrilling third movement, a high piano trill motif is like a high-wire routine setting off a chain reaction of tremolo pyrotechnics throughout the ensemble, from rattling triangle to glissando violin. An intriguing album fusing the traditional and the contemporary.”
Liam Cagney, Gramophone, March 2023, (review of Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions)
“For Cheung, those toys can be seen in terms of instrumental diversity. Composed for 18 players, [Parallel Play] boasts a tonal, atonal, and microtonal spectrum that’s expansive, including an overlay of piano, micro-tuned electronic keyboard, and organ. The instruments function as solo voices, paired groups, contrasting clusters, overlays, and collisions. As the performance conducted by [John] Adams evolved, I found it advantageous to forego the sociological permutations and childhood-play metaphor in favor of a total immersion into Cheung’s complex and sophisticated instrumental interplay and layering. The effect was like being drawn, like Alice, down the rabbit hole.
Jim Farber, San Francisco Classical Voice, March 2023
“Null and void (2021) was composed for the soundtrack of a short silent film Stump the Guesser, created by the Canadian filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson. In his liner notes, Tim Rutherford-Johnson describes the film as having a “surrealistic, absurdist tone,” and being inspired by the Russian poet and dramatist Daniil Karms (1905-1942). Cheung responds to the material, and to Karms’ aesthetic, with nearly everything but the kitchen sink: Harry Partch’s instruments, thunderous, motoric percussion that references Russian futurism, swing-era jazz brass, with wah-wah mutes, glissandos, and altissimo stabs, and a pistol firing (there is a game of Russian roulette on screen). I would greatly like to see how it syncs up with the film, but null and void as an aural document has a beguiling sound world. Cheung’s partnership with Kairos continues to expand, encompassing a variety of techniques and inspirational material. Accompanying videos of these pieces would be welcome – dare we hope for a DVD release?”
Christian Carey, Sequenza21, February 2023, (review of Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions)
“San Francisco-born Anthony Cheung is one of America’s most imaginative young composers. Yet his work has been better appreciated across the Atlantic…From his idol Beethoven, Cheung inherited a sense of motivic coherence that helps to organize his kaleidoscopic sonorities…In the exquisite slow movement, “Weightless/Sustained,” Cheung exhibits a knack for synesthetic textures and colors. This is what a quartz might sound like if it could sing — the piano’s prismatic upper register supported by pizzicato strings and mallet percussion. Intricate metric layering and floating woodwind lines help to lend the impression that we’re astral-projecting through some crystal cosmos. The closing “Woven Wire” movement is an homage to the gyroscopic sculptures of Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa. Cheung captures the moiré patterns of her basket-like creations in a virtuosic perpetuum mobile for Wiget, who executes impossibly difficult cross rhythms with player-piano precision. For the pinwheeling grand finale, jackhammer repeated notes and funnel-shaped two-hand runs seem to suck us down into the accelerating vortex of Asawa’s crisscrossing wires.
Joe Cadigan, San Francisco Classical Voice, Jan. 2023, (review of Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions)
“Cheung’s concerto plays with the contrasts between occupied and empty spaces through the opposition between the piano and its orchestral accompaniment. The piano, as the sound surrogate for Asawa’s sculptures, throws out a filament of fragmentary, skittering lines whose interstices are filled by the surrounding strings, winds, and brass. In the first movement these latter tend toward independent, individual lines, while in the slow second movement they are grouped into fused masses. The agitated final movement suggests the experience of perceiving an object from shifting perspectives — an appropriate way to apprehend Asawa’s wire sculptures, whose elaborately traced shadows throw out dynamic patterns when seen from a mobile viewpoint.
Conceptually, the single movement The Natural Word, also from 2019, is the most intriguing work on the album…Many of the sounds described by the captions are natural—wind, birdsong, the sounds of frogs and seagulls, thunder—but others are more abstract and, presumably, challenging to put into music. This is where Cheung’s mastery of the timbral potentials of orchestral instruments comes fully into its own…The result is a cohesive soundtrack suggesting a narrative logic one can’t quite put one’s finger on—like experiencing a dream or watching a film with peripheral vision only–but which nevertheless makes perfect sense. At a more prosaic level, Cheung’s orchestrations of the sounds described—low strings for ships’ horns; glissandi on high strings for wind blowing; fused strings and winds for the EKG machine—mimic their models to an uncanny degree.”
Daniel Barbiero, Percosi Musicali, November 2022 (review of Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions)
“There are numerous rewards in store for anyone who delights in following lines of pure musical thought as evinced by the wondrous repertoire proffered by Cheung. Nothing is gratuitous or extraneous, nor can the musical character ever be taken for granted… Elective Memory and Character Studies are exquisite essays with Cheung’s pianism and Miranda Cuckson’s sinuous violin lines with subtle variations and nuanced inflection. Meanwhile on the enlightened finale, All thorn, but cousin to your rose, lofty theatrics by Paulina Swierczek (soprano) and Jacob Greenberg (piano) bring Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Pushkin to life again.”
Raul da Gama, The WholeNote, November 2022 (review of All Roads)
“The result is a Nobel Lecture cast as a one-act monodrama; “Erwartung” set in the offices of The Paris Review. Soprano Paulina Swierczek recites the opening lines of Nabokov’s screed like Berg’s “Lulu” leading a linguistics seminar. The detours and cul-de-sacs of full-blown musical lines and wordless vocalises resemble Nabokov’s own copious marginalia. Her read of “masterpiece” receives an asterisk of editorializing coloratura. Accompanist Jacob Greenberg underlines “according to his own taste” with punctuated, but shallow, chords. When Swierczek asks, “What is translation?,” the question is almost unintelligible, swallowing itself up in the upper registers of the soprano’s range in a way that recalls Ligeti’s “Mysteries of the Macabre.” At some point, Nabokov cautions, translations go back and forth so long that the original meaning is completely eroded. Cheung makes good on that warning. His initial impulse for the work that became “All but Thorn” was to feed texts through Google Translate and set the results, an act he preserves here in sending Gertrude’s couplet through several iterations of Google Translate, further wilting Ophelia’s flowers with each step… The two-movement “Character Studies” balances frantic switching between lines and style, as if Cuckson were an actor playing multiple roles onstage in fast secession, with a hothouse flower of a monologue—the sort that is so engrossing that it makes time in the theater stand still, but so delicate in its effect that it seems to dissipate into the ether immediately after the final words are spoken. There may have been one performance or one actor that inspired this work, but the ambiguity Cheung leaves in its description gives us space to make our own connections.”
Olivia Giovetti, Van Magazine, August 2022 (review of All Roads)
“Each of the works somehow repurposes old notions or conceits. The eight-movement title work, performed by the Escher Quartet and pianist Gilles Vonsattel, is infused with the harmonic and melodic essence of the Billy Strayhorn ballad “Lotus Blossom”… the music soon carves out its own space, emitting only faint traces of that devastating tune. Instead, Cheung allows it to open up for him, unleashing darkness lurking in the original and cleaving it open through gorgeous orchestration that takes the listener to an emotional precipice.”
Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily: Best Contemporary Classical, August 2022 (review of All Roads)