Several discs featuring Anthony Cheung’s music appear in late 2022!
On August 12, New Focus releases All Roads, an album of chamber works centering around the eponymous multi-movement piano quintet (2018) with pianist Gilles Vonsattel and the Escher Quartet. Violinist Miranda Cuckson performs the mercurial, constantly shifting Character Studies (2016) and is joined by the composer in the duo Elective Memory (2015) which echoes Beethoven’s Op. 96 sonata. And in All thorn, but cousin to your rose (2017), soprano Paulina Swierczek and pianist Jacob Greenberg illustrate the finer points of translation via the polemical humor of Vladimir Nabokov, oscillating between sardonic wit and serious lyricism.
In October, Austrian new music label KAIROS releases Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions, which brings together three works for large ensemble. A line can go anywhere: Concerto for Piano and Ensemble (2019) was written with the wire sculptures of Ruth Asawa in mind, and for the forces of Ensemble Modern, with soloist Ueli Wiget and conductor Franck Ollu. The Natural Word (2019), written for Ensemble Dal Niente and conducted by Michael Lewanski, uses stock captions of sounds found in film and television as starting points for transcription, depiction, soundtrack, and Foley. Written in collaboration with video artist Tristan Cook and scholar Sean Zdenek, the piece is an extension of an interest in semiotics, expanded and in dialogue with disability studies and media studies. And null and void (2021) exists as both a musical accompaniment to Stump the Guesser – the irreverent silent film by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson – as well as an independent work on its own. The piece draws on the unique virtuosity of Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Elena Schwarz.
Additionally, two solo piano works appear on albums by pianists Bertrand Chamayou and Shai Wosner.
Chamayou’s new recording of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Warner Classics, June 2022) includes a short tribute, Live Ear Emission! Homage to Olivier Messiaen. This early work from 2001, previously withdrawn and now revived, is one of five pieces in honor of Messiaen, with the others by Jonathan Harvey, György Kurtág, Tristan Murail, and Toru Takemitsu.
For Shai Wosner’s Variations on a Theme by FDR (New Focus, December 2022), the pianist invited composers Derek Bermel, Anthony Cheung, John Harbison, Vijay Iyer, and Wang Lu to each write a work inspired by an American immigrant who has had an impact on them. Bitter Seas (2020), a reflection on the life and work of artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, is included in the collection.
