“When you read his program notes for this, his third portrait album [Cycles and Arrows], you quickly realize that any echo of past forms or other compositions comes from a place of deep scholarship and musical understanding. Combined with a sureness of orchestration that feels natural and intuitive but is surely the product of much study and experimentation, the result is a delightful array of compositions from the last five years. Take the opening work, written for flute and string quartet and cheekily entitled The Real Book of Fake Tunes. Over five short movements, the dialogue between the players unfurls with such wit and elegance you almost forget there are five people working together to produce the sounds… So it goes throughout the album, whether combining Chinese instruments with Western ones in More Marginalia (played by the astonishing Atlas Ensemble) or composing for solo oboe in Après une Lecture, which is cleverly based on notated speech patterns Cheung saw in the notebooks of Leos Janacek and played to perfection by Ernest Rombout. The International Contemporary Ensemble appears on two pieces, the swaggering Assumed Roles with violist Maiya Papach, and Time’s Vestiges, which ends the album with a sense of unresolved mystery, like a flashlight’s beam being swallowed by tunnel. Cycles And Arrows is, like Dystemporal from 2016, further proof that Cheung is one of the finest composers of our time.
Jeremy Shatan, An Earful