Posts in QUEEN OF HEARTS
QUEEN OF HEARTS (PIANO TRIO #1) (2017)

"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

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