SAINT ELIZABETH BELLS (2012)
“Saint Elizabeth Bells reminisced on Agócs’s father’s last days. In nine minutes, cellist Allison Drenkow streamed through the spectrum of human emotions. Her instrument’s sound trembled and roared under the otherworldly ring of Nicholas Tolle’s cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer that sounds like a piano echoing in a dream.”
- THE BOSTON GLOBE, Hub New Music Transports with all-Kati Agócs program, January 27, 2016 (Zoë Madonna)
“Saint Elizabeth Bells conjured up a hallucinatory world of overtones, musical material derived from church bells near the hospital where [the composer’s] father lay dying in 2011. The peculiar richness of the cimbalom (played by Nicholas Tolle) generated layers of harmonic haze within which Allison Drenkow’s cello sang with lyric melancholy.”
- THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER, Hub New Music Debuts with “Strength in Fragility”, January 24, 2016 (Brian Schuth)
“The concert ended with two pieces featuring percussionist Chester Englander, whose expertise lies with the cimbalom. Englander’s soft skitters and sudden accents conversed with Diodore’s swirling figures in Kati Agócs’s Saint Elizabeth Bells. 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, Review of No Exit Ensemble at Spaces in Cleveland, 23 September 2019 (Nicholas Stevens)