EXCERPTS FROM RECENT REVIEWS

“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.”

[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."

"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."

"Very physical…Division of Heaven and Earth by the Hungarian-American composer Kati Agócs was premiered after the intermission. Quoting Liszt, 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.....in which the Liszt quotations act as symbols of safety.....”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 [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.”