IMAGINATION OF THEIR HEARTS (2004)
"Ms. Agócs’s work is a song cycle, its texts drawn from Latin, Hungarian, and English poetry and a letter from Joan of Arc in French. The fifth movement will be a setting of an Italian text, the piece’s point being the universality of the passions and the way they fire writers’ imaginations. Ms. Agócs’s imagination is fairly nimble: although her harmonic style can be fairly dense, her vocal writing has an almost 19th-century naturalness. She has, in other words, avoided the unnatural leaps and spiky rhythms frequently heard in vocal works by composers whose harmonic sense she has embraced.
Ms. Agócs’s approach to accompaniment is striking, too. Although she wrote the work for Antares, a quartet that consists of a pianist, a violinist, a clarinetist, and a cellist, she used the full group sparingly. In the opening movement, for example, the singer is accompanied by violin and cello; the fourth is scored for only voice and cello. Brenda Patterson, a mezzo-soprano with an appealingly warm sound (she is the cellist’s sister), gave the work a shapely reading that pointed up Ms. Agócs’s responsive to the texts.”
” - THE NEW YORK TIMES, Review of Imagination of Their Hearts as premiered by Brenda Patterson and Antares, January 2004 (Allan Kozinn)
"The outstanding work [on the disc] is Kati Agócs's Imagination of Their Hearts, a cycle for voice and four instruments setting medieval and folk poems in five languages..." - BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE, Review of CD 'The Ice Age and Beyond' by Patricia Green and Midori Koga on Blue Griffin/Albany Label, June 2009