IMAGINATION OF THEIR HEARTS (2004)
Kati Agocs
"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. A nimble imagination; a striking approach to accompaniment, responsive to the texts…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.”
- 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 (2004), 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