"Melting, ice-like, high-register piano notes open Kati Agocs's Supernatural Love, followed by beams of sunlight in the violin. A slowly evolving urgency characterizes the next movement. The third movement begins with racing chords on the piano, echoed by counterpoint in the violin. The duet takes on a masculine-feminine argument, along with simultaneous pizzicato violin with percussive single-note piano. The overall effect is serene and unworldly, exploring space with sound in a way that seems to evoke the time before the universe hosted life."

-Fanfare Magazine, July/August 2010
http://www.fanfaremag.com/content/view/39191/10237

"Requiem Fragments was moving and taut: rolling waves of tangled activity breaking into a cathartic tonal chorale - only to crash and collapse into a quiet, scattered ending".
- ,The Boston Globe (Matthew Guerrieri): Review of Boston Modern Orchestra Project's U.S. Premiere performance of Requiem Fragments, 28 May 2010, Jordan Hall, Boston

"The three movements of Kati Agocs's mesmerizing Immutable Dreams take a quintet through vast sonic terrain, from delicacy to angry density. The second movement is an homage to the late György Ligeti in which the piano plays a bold cadenza (Lisa Kaplan made it a commanding moment), while the finale, "Husks," evokes poetic images through floating gestures and thunderous sonorities."

-The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Donald Rosenberg), "eighth blackbird soars in modern fare", 18 March 2009

Reviews of Boston Modern Orchestra Project (Gil Rose, conductor) with Kati Agócs and Lisa Bielawa as soprano soloists, Jordan Hall, The New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, 17 January 2009:

"The newest member of the composition faculty, Kati Agócs, was represented by By the Streams of Babylon, for two sopranos and orchestra, a brief setting of Psalm 137 that encased the text's lament in music of fluidity and austere beauty."

-The Boston Globe (David Weininger), 20 January 2009

"Set in Latin for its liturgical significance (rather than in the Hebrew of the psalm), the work requires two sopranos to sing in straight tone, also evoking the history of medieval liturgy. The sopranos, Lisa Bielawa and the composer herself, captured this mysterious historicity with their gorgeously clear voices."

-Boston ConNECtion Concert Review, (Sarah Canice Funke), http://classical-music-performances.suite101.com/

Review of new CD "Breath Beneath" by the PRISM Saxophone Quartet:

" Kati Agócs’ beautiful Coloratura incorporates both the vocal and intervallic strengths of the saxophone. It’s made up of six short motets that are modeled after choral music; a sighing “Introit,” a pensive “Laud,” a nervous “Hoquetus,” a “Lamentation” that features quiet chattering, a poised, eruptive “Fuging Tune” and a gorgeous “Hymn” that begins with the warmth of Das Rheingold."
- From 'Four Brothers', Review in the New York City-based blog The Big City, February 2010

Review of new CD 'The Ice Age and Beyond' by Patricia Green and Midori Koga on Blue Griffin/Albany Label:

"The outstanding work [on the disc] is Kati Agócs's Imagination of Their Hearts (2004), a cycle for voice and four instruments setting medieval and folk poems in five languages"
-BBC Music Magazine, June 2009 issue

Reviews of Pearls at its premiere in Zankel Hall (Carnegie Hall), New York, by the American Composers Orchestra with George Manahan conducting:

"...filled with attractive ideas...."

-The New York Times (Steve Smith), 23 February 2009

"Pearls, by the promising Kati Agócs, an American Composers Orchestra commission that she describes as 'chorales with peregrinations', was pretty (as usual for her). It was artfully shaped for the 35-member ensemble, and its thoughtful, unhurried performance was led with able definition by George Manahan, New York City Opera’s music director, in his first ACP appearance here. Based on a parable from the Gospel of St Matthew about the value of selling everything to buy the best pearl, its 'jeweled sonorities' include chimes and tuba plus rattles".

-American Composers Orchestra Review, Notes on Notes (Leslie Kandell), 20 February 2009
http://lesliekandell.typepad.com/notesonnotes/american-composers-orchestra-review.html


EXCERPTS FROM RECENT REVIEWS:

Supernatural Love:

"The music [Supernatural Love] speaks of loss and redemption...The moods vary throughout the movements. The first is spectral, wounded, desolate, and cold. The second is open, warm, rhapsodic and elegant. The third is emancipated, explosive, monolithic, nattering frantically like music from a charnel ground. Vivid and strong work."

-Showtime.ca, Stanley Fefferman: Review of Supernatural Love as played by Duo Concertante, Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, August 2008

"Supernatural Love began with silent, haunting keys accompanied by sad strokes on the violin. The strokes of sorrow tied together as the piano chimed. Nancy Dahn used her violin to amplify an inner, womanly call, gradually slowing the music to a still point. Then, the composer created a music of “empty sound.” It was an extraordinary moment, showing emptiness, or loss, as a triumph over sorrow, clearing away an obstruction to life. There lies the Supernatural Love.”

I and Thou:

[Orchestra of St. Luke’s Second Helpings Series, Notable Women Festival- - Works by Joan Tower, Libby Larsen, Tania Léon, Jennifer Higdon, and Kati Agócs]:
"Both cellists were heard in I and Thou, a new piece commissioned from Kati Agócs, a gifted young composer who recently earned her doctorate from Juilliard. A brooding first movement, punctuated with courtly trills, segued into a second movement in which syncopated melodies were draped across chugging ostinatos. The performance could have used more polish, but the music warranted Ms. Agócs’s inclusion in such notable company."

Division of Heaven and Earth:

"Very physical…Division of Heaven and Earth by the Hungarian-American composer Kati Agócs was premiered after the intermission. It is an exploration of the magician's box of romantic fireworks where the pianist is captivated in maniacal and almost vertiginous runs between the extremes of the keyboard."

”Programmatical metamusic.....by talented American with a Hungarian father.....”

Immutable Dreams:

"Then, the centerpiece of the program, the newly commissioned work by Kati Agócs [Immutable Dreams], had its world premiere. This piece, written in the light of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, displayed new constellations of timbre – some raw, some effervescent, some irridescent, some incandescent, and some luminous. Composer Agócs marshals this galaxy of sound into a brilliant new composition that, metaphorically, is visually striking, and aurally gorgeous. The ensemble’s playing was wonderful."

By the Streams of Babylon:

"By the Streams of Babylon is a setting of a psalm, the lament of a people in a foreign land who can no longer bring themselves to sing the hymns of their homeland. The piece is haunting and reflective..."

Imagination of Their Hearts:

"Ms. Agócs’s work [Imagination of Their Hearts, premiered by Brenda Patterson and Antares in January 2004] is a song cycle, its texts drawn from Latin, Hungarian, and English poetry and a letter from Joan of Arc in French. The fifth movement will be a setting of an Italian text, the piece’s point being the universality of the passions and the way they fire writers’ imaginations. A nimble imagination; a striking approach to accompaniment, responsive to the texts…Although her harmonic style can be fairly dense, her vocal writing has an almost 19th-century naturalness. She has, in other words, avoided the unnatural leaps and spiky rhythms frequently heard in vocal works by composers whose harmonic sense she has embraced.”

Caritas:

“The Yale fellows gave an assured performance of Kati Agócs's intriguing Caritas, in which well-behaved but oddly unsettling two-part counterpoint for flute and cello becomes discombobulated when the stark piano part enters.”

At First Light:

“At First Light [for String Orchestra, premiered by Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra] by 25-year-old Juilliard student and professional soprano Kati Agócs, stood up proudly in good company. It combines great tensile strength with a gorgeous unfolding of luminous lyrical episodes, rich inventive counterpoint, and a feeling of deep, elusive mystery. Agócs reveals her procedural machinery in the music’s final moments, but the mystery remained long after this superb performance was over.”

“Imagine my delight when a passage in the cellos soon captivated my ears with the makings of a truly individual voice, a voice that increased in color and ingenuity as the work continued.”

Every Lover is a Warrior:

"An innovative composer moved to write for the instrument after encountering a major player…in Every Lover Is a Warrior, the promising young composer Kati Agócs spins folk materials into a powerful, ruminative suite. Add it all up, and calling this a strong contender for the year’s most distinguished debut CD doesn’t seem like an overstatement.”

“The other works on the program [Britten’s Suite for Harp, Carter’s Bariolage, and Hindemith’s Sonata for Harp] are about what the notes say, as opposed to the program’s world premiere, Every Lover is a Warrior, by the 30-year-old composer Kati Agócs, which is more about what the notes suggest. The music itself is like a series of haiku poems, written with an economy that allowed room for the listener to contemplate a multiplicity of meaning as well as the subtle interruptions in symmetry that told you that nothing was what it seemed. With [harpist Bridget] Kibbey’s atmospheric range of articulation, the piece seemed as fine as any around it.”