The New York Times praises John Zorn at 70: Music for Strings
"Capturing John Zorn at 70: One Concert Is Just a Start"
In his rave review of John Zorn at 70: Music for Strings, the first of three Composer Portraits of John Zorn this season that "celebrate this restless and eclectic musician’s milestone year," The New York Times' Music Critic Seth Colter Walls writes that "Thursday’s concert began with a two-trumpet fanfare, Circe (2019), rendered with panache by Peter Evans and Sam Jones...In between piercing trills, you could perceive and appreciate the way units of melody passed between the players."
For Sigil Magick, the string quintet — featuring the JACK Quartet and cellist Michael Nicolas — presented "deliriously contrasting material."
With Zorn's mini-opera The Gas Heart, Walls notes that "befitting his reputation, the pacing of motivic events inside that work and others tended to be fast and furious. Yet each piece also communicated joy — and a certain fellowship among the interpreters who had spent time together mastering Zorn’s rigorous, change-on-a-dime aesthetic."
“I came away from the Miller show dazzled by the way in which a supple new approach to beauty has established itself in the past decade or two of his output.”