All Roads is the fourth portrait album from Anthony Cheung and releases in August 2022 on New Focus Recordings. The album centers around the titular multi-movement piano quintet (2018) with pianist Gilles Vonsattel and the Escher Quartet. Violinist Miranda Cuckson performs the mercurial, constantly shifting Character Studies (2016) and is joined by the composer in the duo Elective Memory (2015) which echoes Beethoven’s Op. 96 sonata. And in All thorn, but cousin to your rose (2017), soprano Paulina Swierczek and pianist Jacob Greenberg illustrate the finer points of translation via the polemical humor of Vladimir Nabokov, oscillating between sardonic wit and serious lyricism.
All Roads (2018)
Gilles Vonsattel, piano; Escher Quartet (Adam Barnett-Hart and Danbi Um, violins; Pierre Lapointe, viola; Brook Speltz, cello)
Elective Memory (2015)
Miranda Cuckson, violin; Anthony Cheung, piano
Character Studies (2016)
Miranda Cuckson, violin
All thorn, but cousin to your rose (2017)
Paulina Swierczek, soprano; Jacob Greenberg, piano
Selected Reviews
“The result is a Nobel Lecture cast as a one-act monodrama; “Erwartung” set in the offices of The Paris Review. Soprano Paulina Swierczek recites the opening lines of Nabokov’s screed like Berg’s “Lulu” leading a linguistics seminar. The detours and cul-de-sacs of full-blown musical lines and wordless vocalises resemble Nabokov’s own copious marginalia. Her read of “masterpiece” receives an asterisk of editorializing coloratura. Accompanist Jacob Greenberg underlines “according to his own taste” with punctuated, but shallow, chords. When Swierczek asks, “What is translation?,” the question is almost unintelligible, swallowing itself up in the upper registers of the soprano’s range in a way that recalls Ligeti’s “Mysteries of the Macabre.” At some point, Nabokov cautions, translations go back and forth so long that the original meaning is completely eroded. Cheung makes good on that warning. His initial impulse for the work that became “All but Thorn” was to feed texts through Google Translate and set the results, an act he preserves here in sending Gertrude’s couplet through several iterations of Google Translate, further wilting Ophelia’s flowers with each step… The two-movement “Character Studies” balances frantic switching between lines and style, as if Cuckson were an actor playing multiple roles onstage in fast secession, with a hothouse flower of a monologue—the sort that is so engrossing that it makes time in the theater stand still, but so delicate in its effect that it seems to dissipate into the ether immediately after the final words are spoken. There may have been one performance or one actor that inspired this work, but the ambiguity Cheung leaves in its description gives us space to make our own connections.”
Olivia Giovetti, Van Magazine, August 2022
“Each of the works somehow repurposes old notions or conceits. The eight-movement title work, performed by the Escher Quartet and pianist Gilles Vonsattel, is infused with the harmonic and melodic essence of the Billy Strayhorn ballad “Lotus Blossom”… the music soon carves out its own space, emitting only faint traces of that devastating tune. Instead, Cheung allows it to open up for him, unleashing darkness lurking in the original and cleaving it open through gorgeous orchestration that takes the listener to an emotional precipice.”
Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily: Best Contemporary Classical, August 2022
“There are numerous rewards in store for anyone who delights in following lines of pure musical thought as evinced by the wondrous repertoire proffered by Cheung. Nothing is gratuitous or extraneous, nor can the musical character ever be taken for granted… Elective Memory and Character Studies are exquisite essays with Cheung’s pianism and Miranda Cuckson’s sinuous violin lines with subtle variations and nuanced inflection. Meanwhile on the enlightened finale, All thorn, but cousin to your rose, lofty theatrics by Paulina Swierczek (soprano) and Jacob Greenberg (piano) bring Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Pushkin to life again.”
Raul da Gama, The WholeNote, November 2022