Two reviews of our San Francisco performance of The Only Moving Thing have so far appeared, in the San Francisco Chronicle (SF’s main daily) and the San Francisco Classical Voice (an important new classical music review website).
The Chronicle sent their classical music critic, Joshua Kosman, who wrote this very mixed review of our performance. Here are the glowing positives:
In addition to playing their instruments like demons, members of the phenomenal new-music sextet, Eighth Blackbird, often incorporate stage movement into their performances …
[Michael Gordon's piece was] a zestful, witty scherzo in which the performers took turns offering brisk melodic solos like the members of some kind of traveling band.
At the heart of the movement was a distinctive musical punctuation mark, a loud metallic clang from the percussion extended by a long sustained chord from the accordion. That striking musical gesture marked each quick shift in tone, and every time it raised an excited laugh; the one time it didn’t arrive on cue created a brilliant comic gem.
Lang’s three contributions sounded vivid and engaging - the jittery, offbeat dance of the Epilogue in particular sent listeners home pleasantly jazzed up …
That’s especially true given the ferocious virtuosity of the group’s members … There seems to be nothing they can’t do, musically or otherwise.
Jessica Balik wrote the San Francisco Classical Voice review:
To heighten this blithe, lighthearted effect of improvisation, the group played largely from memory. All the players performed with such dexterity that it was easy to forget that the piece was neither improvised nor even remotely simple.
In short, like Double Sextet by Reich, singing in the dead of night is a delectably adept piece for this high-energy — and high-execution — sextet. In the real-world dead of the night, many musicians would sell their souls to perform concerts half as engaging as eighth blackbird’s.
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