Anthony Cheung: All Roads Escher String Quartet, Paulina Swierczek, Miranda Cuckson, Jacob Greenberg

• Anthony Cheung (b. 1982): All Roads:
• 1 Cheung: All Roads: Introduction. First Detour 01:38
• 2 Cheung: All Roads: I. Forking Paths 03:31
• 3 Cheung: All Roads: Interlude. Second Detour 01:48
• 4 Cheung: All Roads: II. Circuitous Routes (Winding Passacaglias) 04:10
• 5 Cheung: All Roads: Interlude. Third Detour 00:57
• 6 Cheung: All Roads: III. Estuary 03:04
• 7 Cheung: All Roads: Interlude. Fourth Detour 02:09
• 8 Cheung: All Roads: IV. Convergence 07:56
• Elective Memory:
• 9 Cheung: Elective Memory: I. Aubade, for a Golden Age 06:42
• 10 Cheung: Elective Memory: II. Broken Scherzo. Tripping Up, Falling Down 06:23
• 11 Cheung: Elective Memory: III. Nocturne. Half-Remembered 05:42
• Character Studies:
• 12 Cheung: Character Studies: I. Dramatis Personae 04:00
• 13 Cheung: Character Studies: II. — 05:00
• All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose:
• 14 Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: Three Grades of Evil 07:53
• 15 Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: Hear the Sledges with the Bells 01:53
• 16 Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: What Is Translation? 02:30
• 17 Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: How Sad Your Apparition Is to Me 04:43
• Total Runtime 01:09:59

Info for Anthony Cheung: All Roads

Composer Anthony Cheung releases All Roads, a follow up to FCR215 Cycles and Arrows. Featuring performances by the Escher Quartet, violinist Miranda Cuckson, soprano Paulina Swierczek, and pianists Jacob Greenberg, Gilles Vonsattel, and Cheung himself, All Roads encapsulates Cheung's penchant for drawing on broad sources of inspiration and filtering them through an incisive and discriminating compositional process to produce substantial, structurally airtight works.

​​There is a rich continuum of possibility when a composer references a pre-existing piece in a new composition. One can present the material literally, as in a set of variations, or one can subsume it entirely, using it as an unseen point of contact for the generation of material for the piece. On All Roads for piano and string quartet, Anthony Cheung leans towards the more obscured end of the spectrum as he uses Billy Strayhorn’s poignant Lotus Blossom as a muse and a structural guide for the piece. The result is an infusion of sorts - the melodic and harmonic components of Strayhorn’s iconic song have seeped into Cheung’s composition, traced obliquely into momentary gestural contours and echoed in strains of distant memory. The pervasive melancholy in Strayhorn’s original work is at the essence of All Roads, as heard in the searching quality of the opening movement and the subsequent “detours.” But Cheung also pushes against its expressive edges, exploring which emotional corners the material will allow him to inhabit, such as the accumulating dialogue of swells in “Forking Paths,” the restless figuration in “Estuary,” and the insistent angularity of the final movement, “Convergence.”

Elective Memory for violin and piano also has a pre-existing piece as its source of inspiration, Beethoven’s Sonata op. 96. With the clever title (a composite of “selective memory” and Goethe’s concept of “elective affinity”), Cheung also alludes to the bond between the composer and iconic Romantic poet that culminated in a series of meetings in 1812, the same year op. 96 was written. He embeds flashes of material from op. 96 into the work, allowing them to evolve in dialogue both between the violin and piano as well as with various elected affinities of his own, notably an earlier violin sonata he wrote at age 18. The result is a work that, despite direct references to op. 96, embodies Goethe’s ruminative character more than the heroic teleology commonly associated with Beethoven’s middle period.

In the two movement violin work Character Studies, dialogue takes place internally within the solo part. The first movement, “Dramatis Personae,” features quick changes in character, imitating a stage actor playing multiple roles, shifting back and forth seamlessly between divergent personalities. The second movement begins linearly, steadily developing a shrouded, lyrical melodic idea before ephemeral arpeggios dance an airy ballet with textural interjections.

The nature of translation and its capacity to generate a palimpsest of meaning lies at the heart of All Thorn, but cousin to your rose, a setting of texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Pushkin, Edgar Allan Poe, and…Google Translate. Initially, Cheung planned to feed texts through Google Translate and set the resultant text, playing a modern game of telephone shaped by Big Tech. But he stumbled upon a polemical essay on translation by Nabokov, a topic that became a point of fixation for the Russian author. Nabokov’s investigation into the shades of diligence and authenticity in translation, and his subsequent efforts in the medium, provide a rich source of text material for a multifarious vocal part, navigating between speech, sprechstimme, wordless vocalization, and conventional singing. Cheung did not entirely abandon his initial idea of co-opting Google Translate however. In the opening movement some of the text is the product of feeding a Shakespeare couplet into the algorithmic tool, translating it into multiple languages, and then back into English. The result is not unlike Cheung’s progressive transformation of Strayhorn’s Lotus Blossom, as it inherits increasing degrees of distance from the original that Cheung sets with sensitivity and wry humor.

Indeed, translation emerges as a conceptual through line on the album. From the wisps of subconscious remembrance in All Roads to the response to Beethoven’s op. 96 in Elective Memory to the meta examination of reinterpretation itself in All Thorn, Cheung is fascinated with the subtle shifts in phenomena that happen through revisitation and recollection, using music as a metaphor to draw our attention to a process that is constantly happening all around us in big ways and small. - Dan Lippel

Escher String Quartet
Paulina Swierczek, soprano
Miranda Cuckson, violin
Jacob Greenberg, piano
Gilles Vonsattel, piano
Anthony Cheung, piano

Anthony Cheung
writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. Described as “gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” (San Francisco Chronicle) and praised for its “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), his music reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre. Representations of space and place are achieved through allusions in spatialization, orchestration, and recorded sound.

Anthony Cheung has been commissioned by leading groups such as the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Cleveland Orchestra (as the Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow), Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). His work “Lyra” was commissioned for the New York Philharmonic at the request of Henri Dutilleux, as part of the orchestra’s inaugural Kravis Prize for New Music. The New York Times wrote of it, “Mr. Cheung’s shimmering score makes a persuasive case for the Orpheus myth as part of a global collective consciousness.” In addition, his music has been performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Chicago Symphony Orchestra (MusicNOW series), Minnesota Orchestra, Ensemble Linea, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, wild Up, Musiques Nouvelles, Atlas Ensemble, Orchestra of the League of Composers, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lorraine, Orchestre National de Lille, eighth blackbird, Dal Niente, the New York Youth Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. More recently, he has written new works for the Escher and Spektral Quartets, violinist Jennifer Koh, flutist Claire Chase, oboist Ernest Rombout, and pianists Gilles Vonsattel, Shai Wosner, and Joel Fan.

The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles Ives Fellowship and Scholarship) and ASCAP, and first prize in the Sixth International Dutilleux Competition (2008), as well as a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2012). He has also received commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm foundations.

Cheung’s music has been programmed at international festivals such as Ultraschall (Berlin), Cresc. Biennale (Frankfurt), Présences (Paris), impuls (Graz), Wittener Tage, Tanglewood, Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Transit (Leuven), Heidelberger Frühling, Helsinki Festival and Musica Nova Helsinki, Centre Acanthes, Musica (Strasbourg), and Nuova Consonanza (Rome).

“Finding this elusive middle path, between compositional rigor and organic musical result, is what I believe makes Anthony’s music so enticing. It somehow swerves the vector of linear music history while at the same time recollecting the remarkable traditions that precede it. It is a mesmerizing glimpse of our future that animates us because it so bewitchingly misremembers our past.”

Three portrait discs have recently appeared: Cycles and Arrows, with the Spektral Quartet, ICE, Atlas Ensemble, and soloists (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal, with the Talea Ensemble and Ensemble Intercontemporain (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts, with the Ensemble Modern and Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). His music and performances have also appeared on New Focus Recordings, Tzadik, and Mode. His music is published by EAM/Schott (PSNY edition), Editions Alphonse Leduc, and in self-published editions (ASCAP).

As a performer and advocate for new music, he co-directed the Talea Ensemble from its founding in 2007 until 2017, performing as a pianist and serving as Artistic Director. With Talea, he performed extensively in the US and abroad as a specialist of new music, and helped to curate programs, conferences, and festivals. As a pianist, he has worked with leading composers such as Pierre Boulez, Stefano Gervasoni, Tristan Murail, Hans Abrahamsen, Iancu Dumitrescu, Julian Anderson, Steve Lehman, Steve Coleman, and Chou Wen-Chung.

As a writer and scholar, he has completed a dissertation on György Ligeti (on the Hamburg Concerto, 2010), as well as articles on contemporary music for both specialists and a general readership. Research interests include notational aesthetics, jazz improvisation and transcription, musical semiotics and topoi, and microtonality and alternate tunings. These are also subjects that continue to have a decisive influence on his creative work.

Anthony Cheung received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, where he taught and also served as assistant conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. His primary composition studies were with Tristan Murail and Bernard Rands, and he has studied additionally at the Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, Domaine Forget, Fontainebleau, and Centre Acanthes, working with many leading composers. His primary piano studies were with Robert Levin and Paul Hersh. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and taught at the University of Chicago from 2013 to 2020. He is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University.

Booklet for Anthony Cheung: All Roads