“[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.”
Pierre Rigaudière, Diapason
“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)
Jeremy Shatan, An Earful
Zachary Lewis, The Plain Dealer
“‘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.”
Timothy Robson, Bachtrack
Dirk Wieschollek, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
“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.”
Seth Colter Walls, Capital New York
“…the crowd at Miller heard a rare glimpse of the early, idea-stuffed Boulez as his first piece, Notations for Piano (1945), found an inspired interpreter in the young pianist Anthony Cheung. Boulez has characteristically been engaged (for decades) with the task of going back and rewriting all these pieces for orchestra, but Cheung's expressive playing—hinting at the fluidity of Debussy at one moment, and in the next dishing out a heart-stopping ritardando with the repeating, ominous bass notes in "Lointain—Calme"—amounted to a plea for just leaving these under-heard classics alone.”