A new portrait album on New Focus Recordings. With performances by the Spektral Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Atlas Ensemble, flutist Claire Chase, pianist Winston Choi, and oboist Ernest Rombout.
The Real Book of Fake Tunes (2015) for flute + string quartet
More Marginalia (2014) for mixed traditional Chinese and Western ensembles
Assumed Roles (2016) for viola and ensemble of 10 musicians
Bagatelles (2014) for piano + string quartet
Après une lecture (2014) for oboe
Time's Vestiges (2013) for ensemble of 9 musicians
Selected Reviews
“It is all in the detail. Anthony Cheung has an intensely accurate sense of where his notes are going, and how and why. His music is so well made that it can give a friendly wave to jazz without falling flat on its face. It can even entice a quotation – from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of all things – to play new games. And its precision is responsible for a wealth of sonic magic.
In this collection of ensemble and chamber pieces, all from 2013-15, the jazz flavour comes across most cheerfully in Assumed Roles, a kind of unconcerto for viola, when a family of springing motifs gradually comes to take over from a four-note pattern that has monopolized the music a while. And the ending of this piece, a long descent shadowing Mahler, again shows how, when Cheung reflects on something, the image remains firmly embedded in his own mirror.
Beethoven you might think a trickier customer, but Cheung handles him adroitly in a set of three Bagatelles for piano and string quartet. Quite apart from the odd quotation or reference, these pieces accept the Beethovenian definition of the bagatelle as something abrupt and compact, nothing mere about it. Similarly bagatellish in this respect are the five movements of The Real Book of Fake Tunes, for flute and quartet.
Though Cheung has a Chinese surname, he was born in San Francisco, and his music only begins to sound Chinese when he is writing for Chinese instruments – along with western ones – in More Marginalia. Even here, the otherness is held tightly in check as much as it is all through his music by abstraction.
All through, too, creative awareness lends a light in which the music reveals itself, beautifully. Yet one piece retains its even more beguiling mystery: Time’s Vestiges, for nine players. This, in twelve minutes or so, irregularly, executes a sweep from low to high – an arrow of time, within which there are many smaller arrows, cycles, and cycles on cycles. At the beginning, soloists take turns with a four-note shape not unrelated to that of Assumed Roles. Time is slow and sticky here, and the instruments need effort to extricate themselves. There follows a sequence of episodes gradually taking over from one another: an imaginary ocean of wavelets and sprays, a multi-instrument staccato pattering, a wonderful horn solo, and finally a crushed harmony of retuned strings in continuous ascent as the piano takes steps in the same direction. Haunting and memorable.
Not to be forgotten, too, is Après une lecture, an oboe solo of recurrent motifs with a startling close.
The excellent performances feature ICE, the Atlas Ensemble, the Spektral Quartet, Winston Choi, Claire Chase and Ernest Rombout.”
Paul Griffiths, Disgwylfa: Record of the Week (March 2021)
“This anthology of recent pieces enchants even more than "Dystemporal” (cf. No. 651). 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. Claire Chase's flutes (piccolo, and C, and alto) weave through the interstices of the more lyrical strings and sometimes envelop them. As with the flutist, the Spektral Quartet modulates brightness and grain. When it comes to producing a more raspy timbre and a vigorous rhythmic frame, the bows hold nothing back.
Cheung’s Chinese cultural heritage and background are manifest in "More Marginalia" (2014): sheng, guzheng, pipa and erhu become the ambiguous alter ego of Western instruments, and vice versa. With a subtlety that is fully his own, he avoids any exorcising drift, and the three moments of the piece return as many "marginal comments" to his "Windswept Cypresses", which appeared in the aforementioned album.
With "Assumed Roles" (2014), the composer returns to his avowed obsession with multiple voices and realities. It is a role play that we attend, and the status of the viola vis-à-vis the ensemble is never final. By the harmonic climate that prevails, and with the help of an electric guitar, the piece takes a spectral coloration, hybridized by looped patterns. Bright and virtuosic, fluid and lyrical - all qualities that the International Contemporary Ensemble renders with naturalness - "Assumed Roles" is typical of the sense of formal dynamics developed by the composer.
“Time's Vestiges” (2013) for ensemble is an extension, with its well-negotiated transition from a faltering overactivity to a stripped stasis. The finely dosed microtonality that Cheung readily uses is also evident in the “Bagatelles" (2014) for piano and string quartet, where its necessity seems obvious. Highlighting Winston Choi, the consubstantial mixture of suppleness and supersonic reactivity increases the communicative vitality of these miniatures. We will surely continue to talk about the musical inventiveness of Anthony Cheung.”
Pierre Rigaudière, Diapason (5-star review, translated from the French), Feb. 2019
“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, Oct. 7, 2018