Online Premiere June 2020
Read More“Modern, lyrical, and fugue-like in its interplay between the four players, Imprimatur challenges both the players and the audience with a hybrid of old and new… a roller coaster of sound, emotion and technique.” - SMILE POLITELY (CHAMPAIGN-URBANA’S CULTURE MAGAZINE)
“A philosophical/ religious discussion in the old style, paired with fresh modernity….as a throbbing prayer, the movement scaled heightened rhythmic suspense to its conclusion…” - THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER
“Some of the most attractive contemporary music I have recently heard” - CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS NEWS-GAZETTE
Read More"Agócs’s Queen of Hearts beguilingly wove a chaconne (that constantly changed) against a melodic line. The rhapsodic and very emotional one-movement work was played with intensity by the Claremont Trio (violinist Emily Bruskin, cellist Julia Bruskin, and pianist Andrea Lam). The piece offered a lot of dynamic contrast and ended on high notes triumphantly." - AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE
"Draws one in and gratifies with its clear communication….The Claremonts matched the intensity and lyricism in the score; plainly, they are making this music their own..." - BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER
"If the 20th-century classical world was about carving up the last of the dissonance and starting radical new schools of composition, the 21st-century classical world seems to be all about synthesis and syncretism, taking up the messy mantle of competing traditions and making something new and personal and beautiful out of it. Kati Agócs fits right in there: her polystylism has been making waves all over the world for the last decade or so…. It would be easy enough to pigeonhole Agócs as yet another post-modern more-is-more composer, but what I hear is an artist with ravenous taste and the skills to match. Compared to her other work, which often includes texts in multiple languages, quotations from earlier composers, grand gestures for percussion, and so on, Queen of Hearts seems positively conservative in its simple neo-Romantic splendour. The music covered a lot of territory, toggling back and forth between the chaconne and the song. Agócs blends the history of piano trio writing with her own distinctive voice." - OREGON ARTSWATCH
Read More"Here the musicians begin the work with toneless scraping that gradually coalesces into musical form. Troubled, searching conversations take shape among the four instruments. At times, they are jagged and confrontational, at others blossoming into the kind of unashamedly soaring, tonal melodies that would not be out of place in the Mozart or Mendelssohn quartets on the program. They conclude in euphonious concord. It was as if the very string-quartet structure that Gubaidulina had dismantled in her piece were being reconstituted here and given a sense of hope by Agócs.” THE WASHINGTON POST
“While there is a central theme and melodic idea that pushes the music forward, the accompanying styles and interpretations range from classical simplicity to dense and complex counterpoint to scratch tones and texture. Most of this melody is based upon a single note turn, and Agócs explores a dizzy array of emotions and compositional approaches to that singular idea.” - LUDWIG VAN TORONTO
"Kati Agócs’s music has been described as encouraging audience members to listen and be changed. In Tantric Variations, she bases her musical explorations on the word tantric, which means woven together. Using a one-bar motive as the basis, she weaves “a landscape that really goes everywhere you could imagine,” [cellist] Rachel Desoer said. Starting with a word referring to the practice of weaving, Agócs is able to both reference the traditional craft as well as evoke the universal idea of weaving strands together to create a unified whole." - THE WHOLENOTE
Read More“The world premiere of Hyacinth Curl was exceptionally transporting. The voices swooned in the sinuous but sparse lines of a Sufi devotional poem, overlapping and swelling into rapturous harmony before joining at last in unison. Occasional arresting peals from the singers’ handbells provided the only accompaniment.” - THE BOSTON GLOBE
“With only two voices the piece cannot engage in the dense layering that characterizes Agócs textures elsewhere. Instead we hear a constant intertwining of melodies recognizable as Agócs’s singing lines that are rich and occasionally angular. Subtle expression thus comes to a heated text that describes a “night of Power”, filled with “Beauty’s divan” and “ambrosial perfume” and “a chalice of the red wine of dawn-tide,” ending with the poet turning to worship the face of his beloved as the bells ring over and over. [The voices] blended beautifully, achieving a restrained but effective aesthetic seduction.”- THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER
Read More“The harp primes the piece with a healthy dose of glitter, a kind of harmonic respiration between diatonic and synthetic scales, under which the strings provide a cushion; over it all, the horn sweeps and soars…” - NEW MUSIC BOX
"a skillful assortment of moods and colors…a moderate and decorous discourse" - THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER
"resourceful...boasts angular by lyrical horn writing…the work engages the ear primarily by gathering and dispersing its energy in unexpected ways" - THE BOSTON GLOBE
Read More"A highly structured celebration of alliteration and assonance…the soprano’s cantillations negotiated sections of misterioso chanting, thematic folksong, and dramatic exclamation-all artfully employed by Agócs" - THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER
"Draws fine imagery…wondrous ease and flow...a hypnotic Bolero-like feel" - VANCOUVERCLASSICALMUSIC.COM
"Crystallography set poet Christian Bök‘s words into ecstatic vocal incantations...instruments flowed slowly, wrapping around the central vocal line, and the percussionist laid down a robust processional rhythm" - THE BOSTON GLOBE
Read More"Northern Lights ignites with sharp dissonances, moving through a fluty warm melody in the second movement; a Newfoundland folk song comes third, followed by an emotionally complex setting of the “Huron Carol.” The fifth movement swells, then trails off in a rapidly glittering auroral arpeggio." - THE SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT
Read More"In nine minutes, [the cellist] streamed through the spectrum of human emotions. Her instrument’s sound trembled and roared under the otherworldly ring of the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer that sounds like a piano echoing in a dream." - THE BOSTON GLOBE
“A tribute to the composer’s father inspired by the church bells he heard on his deathbed, the piece cites familiar hourly chimes only once, but to wrenching effect.” - CLEVELAND CLASSICAL
"Saint Elizabeth Bells conjured up a hallucinatory world of overtones, musical material derived from church bells....the peculiar richness of the cimbalom generated layers of harmonic haze within which the cello sang with lyric melancholy." - THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER
Read More"Melting, ice-like, high-register piano notes open Kati Agócs's Supernatural Love, followed by beams of sunlight in the violin. A slowly evolving urgency characterizes the next movement. The third movement begins with racing chords on the piano, echoed by counterpoint in the violin. The duet takes on a masculine-feminine argument, along with simultaneous pizzicato violin with percussive single-note piano. The overall effect is serene and unworldly, exploring space with sound in away that seems to evoke the time before the universe hosted life." - FANFARE MAGAZINE
“The music speaks of loss and redemption. The moods vary throughout the movements. The first is spectral, wounded, desolate, and cold. The second is open, warm, rhapsodic and elegant. The third is emancipated, explosive, monolithic, nattering frantically like music from a charnel ground. Vivid and strong work." - SHOWTIME.CA
"Supernatural Love began with silent, haunting keys accompanied by sad strokes on the violin. The strokes of sorrow tied together as the piano chimed. Nancy Dahn used her violin to amplify an inner, womanly call, gradually slowing the music to a still point. Then, the composer created a music of “empty sound.” It was an extraordinary moment, showing emptiness, or loss, as a triumph over sorrow, clearing away an obstruction to life. Therein lies the Supernatural Love.” - THE VERNON MORNING SUN
Read More"The three movements of Kati Agócs's mesmerizing Immutable Dreams take a quintet through vast sonic terrain, from delicacy to angry density. The second movement is an homage to the late György Ligeti in which the piano plays a bold cadenza, while the finale, "Husks," evokes poetic images through floating gestures and thunderous sonorities." -THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
"Immutable Dreams closed the concert with an indelible impression. Muscular and direct, it comprised three intense and strongly contrasted movements. This experience lingered well after the concert ended."- THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER
"A restless memento mori for Pierrot ensemble with a haunting pulse. The instruments’ colors imperceptibly blended, fragments of ostinatos picking up on each other and spiraling outward."- THE BOSTON GLOBE
““Microconcerto [in Memoriam György Ligeti]” from Kati Agócs’s Immutable Dreams is a highly concentrated piano concerto…. a tribute in sound to Agócs’s Hungarian heritage and the inspiration of Ligeti, who passed away during the composition of this work."- I CARE IF YOU LISTEN
"This piece, written in the light of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, displayed new constellations of timbre – some raw, some effervescent, some irridescent, some incandescent, and some luminous. Composer Agócs marshals this galaxy of sound into a brilliant new composition that, metaphorically, is visually striking, and aurally gorgeous.” - THE NEW MUSIC CONNOISSEUR
“We need to hear more of this composer.” - THE SARASOTA OBSERVER
Read More“A brooding first movement, punctuated with courtly trills, segued into a second movement in which syncopated melodies were draped across chugging ostinatos. The performance could have used more polish, but the music warranted Ms. Agócs’s inclusion in such notable company” - THE NEW YORK TIMES
"With its soulful directness, and its naturalness of dissonance, I and Thou reveals much about the composer's address to the listener…it reaches the hearer through melody, drama, and clear design" - THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
Read More"A perfect large-scale solo work...As Biddeth Thy Tongue feels like a dramatic soliloquy and possesses a wide expressive range thanks to its juxtaposition of great lyricism and extended techniques" - SEQUENZA 21
"Displays gradients of nuance rarely heard from Adolphe Sax's unwieldly invention." - INNOVA
Read More"Very physical...an exploration of the magician's box of Romantic fireworks where the pianist is captivated in maniacal and almost vertiginous runs between extremes of the keyboard" - DAGENS HYHETER (STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN)
“Programmatical metamusic…by a talented American with a Hungarian father…” - SVENSKA DAGBLADET, (STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN)
Read More"An innovative composer moved to write for the instrument after encountering a major player…a powerful, ruminative suite" - TIME OUT NEW YORK
"The other works on the program [Britten’s Suite for Harp, Carter’s Bariolage, and Hindemith’s Sonata for Harp] are about what the notes say, as opposed to the program’s world premiere, Every Lover is a Warrior, which is more about what the notes suggest. The music itself is like a series of haiku poems, written with an economy that allowed room for the listener to contemplate a multiplicity of meaning as well as the subtle interruptions in symmetry that told you that nothing was what it seemed. With Bridget Kibbey’s atmospheric range of articulation, the piece seemed as fine as any around it." - THE PHILADELPHIA ENQUIRER
"sensitively scored...naturally attuned to the harp's evocative qualities" - THE WASHINGTON POST
"The virtuosic first movement of Every Lover Is a Warrior, based on the Appalachian ballad “John Riley,” had [the harpist] wheeling and tumbling through the octaves, drawing out striking, earthy tones. The solo instrument became a full bluegrass ensemble, both melody and rhythm." - THE BOSTON GLOBE
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