★★★★★
Dusted ReviewsArtist: Nico Muhly Album: Drones & Piano / Drones & Viola / Drones & Violin Label: Bedroom Community Review date: Oct. 5, 2012
Over the past few years, young composer Nico Muhly has evolved from indie rock collaborator to classical music's default wunderkind. Since 2010, old-school label Decca has released three wide-screen Muhly works: I Drink the Air Before Me, A Good Understanding, and Seeing is Believing...
- www.dustedmagazine.com
2013-01-04
★★★★★
Indie-classical composer Nico Muhly's pieces feel like a series of archly posed questions. In their formal inventiveness, love of blank space, and haiku-like neatness, they arouse the part of your brain that suspects it's being outsmarted. Even if you're rarely shaken listening to Muhly, you're usually intrigued: To feel your intellect being playfully, patiently tested, as if he is circling your mind and kicking its tires, can be a wonderfully maddening experience...
- pitchfork.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
With , American composer Nico Muhly sets about questioning and expounding upon the nature of sound in daily life. Noise is all around us -- there is no silence -- and Muhly chooses to honour these ever-present, underlying life drones. This effort collects three previously issued EPs, all of which incorporate the idea of drone within their framework. lays prancing key stabs overtop sheets of humming violin, while and unfold in a more contemplative nature, the drones taking centre stage...
- exclaim.ca
2013-09-11
★★★★★
Part II Material in Sevenths by Nico Muhly Over the past few years, young composer Nico Muhly has evolved from indie rock collaborator to classical music's default wunderkind. Since 2010, old-school label Decca has released three wide-screen Muhly works: I Drink the Air Before Me, A Good Understanding, and Seeing is Believing. In the process, Muhly has written for larger groups of musicians and focused on vocal arrangements...
- dustedmagazine.com
2012-10-08
★★★★★
New music There are many things to love in this collection of orchestral music by the extravagantly lauded - and extravagantly gifted - young American composer Nico Muhly. They include his virtuosic command of the orchestra, the rhythmic fluidity of his writing and especially his ability to craft music that is aggressive and rhapsodic all at once. Yet what I find most moving about this particular disc is the spectacle of an enthusiast sharing his passion with listeners...
- www.sfgate.com
2011-08-15
★★★★★
These days it seems to be a minor trope to connect new music with early music 1. While it's still common to hear new pieces interspersed with the workhorses of the Romantic period in concert halls (orchestra administrators still believe that's the music that fills concert halls), the pairing of the new with the very old raises an interesting set of questions. What is the affinity between the old and the new? Why exclude the Classical and Romantic eras, and what does that exclusion mean...
- dustedmagazine.com
2011-08-08
★★★★★
Minimalism, electronic fusion, and early English choral music don't generally sit together comfortably within the same sentence, still less on the same classical disc. That fact alone makes Seeing Is Believing worth a listen, aside from these superb performances. Twenty-nine-year-old American composer Nico Muhly has an extraordinary CV for his age...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2013-04-23
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDMuhly: Seeing is BelievingNicolas CollonDecca (UMO)2011 The American composer Nico Muhly (b 1981) has worked with Björk, Grizzly Bear, Antony and the Johnsons, Philip Glass and John Rutter among others. In June his first opera, Two Boys, will be premiered at ENO. He also has a passion for choral music and electronic fusions. This makes his music stylishly and wilfully obdurate when it comes to classification...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2011-05-09
★★★★★
The 29-year-old composer Nico Muhly crossed over into the indie world in part because of his many collaborations with indie artists. He's written arrangements and orchestrations for Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Sam Amidon, Grizzly Bear, and Antony & the Johnsons, among others. It also helps that he worked as an editor, conductor, and keyboardist with Philip Glass, whose eloquent minimalism is already a touchstone for many indie and electronic music fans...
- pitchfork.com
2010-12-08
Loading...
