Roundabouts, a portrait CD on Ensemble Modern Medien. Live performances featuring the Ensemble Modern and Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.
vis-à-vis (2010) for 18 musicians with electronics
Roundabouts (2010) for piano
Hyperbaton (2009) for 19 musicians
Fog Mobiles (2010) for horn and orchestra
Discrete Infinity (2011) for 11 musicians
Paul Griffiths writes in his introduction to the disc:
"Cheung’s is music of spectacular sound – of brilliantly imagined solos and gatherings – but it is also music of spectacular time. Harmony being for this composer a condition of movement, we feel ourselves to be travelling through time’s spaces: its zooms and its lulls, its turns and its stallings. The trip is never ordinary."
“These are gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured works that blend American wit and sentiment with the fearless abrasiveness of European modernism — a combination that meshes more smoothly than you might imagine. “Fog Mobiles” for horn and orchestra, for instance, is a Bay Area memory piece channeled through a rigorous, hard-scrubbed approach to instrumental timbre, and the title work — an expansive and endlessly surprising piano solo superbly played by Ueli Wiget — offers a range of rhythmic and textural strategies. But the most fascinating piece here is “Hyperbaton,” which explodes into being and then patiently and quite movingly works through the implications of its own birth."
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, January 2, 2015