Comments about the show:

Anne Midgette, Washington Post
“Six musicians are playing a duet with recorded versions of themselves. It is like looking into an electronic mirror. The mirror refracts the rapid, driving beat of piano and marimba; it adds a reflected gleam to long-held chords of strings and winds. The players, live and recorded, create layer upon layer of sound, a rich mille-feuille of music, while pinwheeling light-images create visual parallels on the wall behind them.”

Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
“The one movement that took full advantage of the stage was Gordon's "The Light of the Dark," 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.”

Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
“Lasting 50 minutes and staged by the choreographer Susan Marshall, "singing in the dead of night" is a raucous, sad, scary, often disturbing conjuring-up of night images inspired by the Beatles' "Blackbird." Each composer takes a line from Paul McCartney's lyrics. Lang's is "these broken wings," and he uses it in a prologue, middle episode and epilogue. At grating volumes, slow-moving pitches pierced the room. In the middle episode, a sad-sack player is loaded up, head to foot, with buckets, metal pipes and doodads, which slowly clank to the floor. Gordon describes his episode, "the light of the dark," as a drunken, late-night jam session. The cello wails, the violin jigs, the pianist plays mad accordion, the violinist strums a guitar, a percussionist has a tableful of tools. Wolfe, in "singing in the dead of night," brings out the birdseed, poured from buckets onto a table. Pairs of players take turns rubbing the seed, putting their heads down in it, sleeping restlessly.”

Allan Kozin, New York Times
“Mr. Gordon’s and Ms. Wolfe’s scores, interposed among these movements, in some ways match their impulses. Mr. Gordon’s piece continues the rambunctiousness of Mr. Lang’s opening movement, upping the ante by having the musicians play additional instruments, including accordion and harmonica, usually with an aggressive edge. And Ms. Wolfe’s work expands on the melancholy edge of Mr. Lang’s middle movement, gradually picking up speed, heft and lyricism.”

Comments about eighth blackbird:

Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
“In addition to playing their instruments like demons, members of the phenomenal new-music sextet, Eighth Blackbird, often incorporate stage movement into their performances… There seems to be nothing they can't do, musically or otherwise…”

Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
“Musicians, forced to keep count as though their lives depend on it, typically treat Reich's music as a left-brain activity. But the left brain can't hold all that music, and for listeners, all those fractured rhythms spill over onto the right side, where there is room for spatial perception. A really good performance, then, feels like a barely controlled explosion between your ears. Tuesday's was a really good, rocking, rollicking performance.”

Allan Kozin, New York Times
“You can measure a new-music group’s success by the composers it commissions. When Eighth Blackbird began performing, in 1996, its repertory consisted largely of revivals of older scores and works by young composers in the early stages of their careers. The group has not forsaken those composers, nor has it given up curatorial programming completely, but the program it played at Zankel Hall on Thursday evening showed that it is now in another league… The performance, virtuosic, polished and played largely from memory, was choreographed by Susan Marshall with an amusing quirkiness that reflected the music’s energy”