“[The Bergamot Quartet and Claire Chase] performed Anthony Cheung’s “Real Book of Fake Tunes,” a collection of short pieces that are not exactly “tunes” in the traditional sense, but rather encourage performers — and audiences — to luxuriate in the shifting colors and textures of the instruments… Bergamot’s sound zipped up, radiating with an urgency to communicate something fascinating and rare.”
“Cheung has matured, the refinement of his writing illuminates discourse as form. If the Impressionist tendency of "The Real Book of Fake Tunes" (2015) can sometimes call to mind Debussy or Roussel (undoubtedly the alloy of the flute and the strings, here a quartet) and even Murail, it is thanks not only to the fluidity of the material, but especially to the circulation of its influx between the voices.”
Pierre Rigaudière, Diapason (5-star review of Cycles and Arrows, translated from French)
Cheung’s concern with instrumental color follows naturally from his formation as a composer… One of the more adventurous instances is More Marginalia (2014) for a ten-piece ensemble… The ensemble’s unconventional makeup allows Cheung to set up shifting timbral alliances and oppositions between groups of instruments whose contrasting voices reflect contrasting traditions and playing techniques; especially effective are the contrasts between the plucked and bowed Chinese instruments on the one hand, and Western strings and winds on the other.
On All thorn, but cousin to your rose: “Cheung’s piece was a metatextual monodrama commentary on translation and artistry, with [Jacob] Greenberg again anchoring a keyboard instrument (this time piano) and soprano Paulina Swierczek acting as the audience’s guide through layers of Nabokov, Google Translate, and Edgar Allan Poe.”
“‘Topos,’…straddled these two extremes with daunting magnificence...In four movements for large orchestra, Cheung took up the "Topos" ("Topics") of night music, "Storm and Stress," love, and hunting, in each case repurposing apt excerpts from the likes of Beethoven and Mahler as pigments in the musical equivalent of a freeform drip painting.”
“Composer Cheung…cheerfully acknowledged in a program note that his piece didn’t contain much in the way of “tunes.” But the influence of jazz could be detected in each of its five movements, from the swoopy strings under the stratospheric piccolo and violin phrases of the opening bars to the graceful swing and sway of the movement that followed..”
“Dystemporal for 23 players (2012) presents turbulent sound textures with a bewildering simultaneity of difference, a wonderfully disturbed music. And SynchroniCities (2012) draws a rhapsodic abundance of heterogeneous thoughts, into which concrete sounds of various trips are incorporated…The field recordings from Cheung's trunks are not in the sense of “musique concrète,” cut into collage, but are either instrumentally transformed or just barely perceptible in the background. Not least, Cheung seeks out the hidden aesthetic qualities of real sounds beyond their cultural function, as acoustic artifacts. The Talea Ensemble, which Cheung himself co-founded and where he is an active pianist, performs brilliantly through the intercultural cosmos of Cheung's music.”
