See all press reviews for As One
See all press reviews for The Crossroads Project/Rising Tide
Political and social themes are common in (Kaminsky’s) work. She wrote And Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary after living in Ghana in the early 1990s, working at the National Academy of Music in Winneba. Her Vukovar Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano was written in 1999 after a performance in that war-ravaged village in Croatia, and is dedicated to the victims of ethnic cleansing. She composed the string quartet Transformations II: Music for a Changing World in 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11 … Innovative sound has been a driving force for Ms. Kaminsky since she was a child. Among her influences (are) Dmitri Shostakovich, Meredith Monk, Stephen Sondheim and Brazilian pop.”
– The New York Times
Yelena Dyachek as Dominique de Menil in “Some Light Emerges.” Photo: Lynn Lane
Some Light Emerges, the new opera commissioned by Houston Grand Opera through its community collaborative initiative, dives right into Rothko and de Menil’s shared spiritual vision with plaintive, purposefully meandering music by Laura Kaminsky and an audacious libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed … it’s nothing short of a pronunciation of American ideals. The piece remained sublime, a testament to both the performers and the writing.” – Houston Chronicle
[In Some Light Emerges] Kaminsky has a knack for making characters sound real even while singing operatic lines. Director Robin Guarino’s fluent staging helped all (the characters’) human traits come across. Conductor Bradley Moore and the ensemble set the scene. Whether it was evoking fog enclosing an airport, mimicking Texas crickets or underlining the characters’ ruminations, the group played lucidly.” – Texas Classical Review
“… an extensive Fantasy for solo piano by Laura Kaminsky (N.Y. premiere) explored, in episodic fashion, piano sonorities from Debussyesque gongs and watery burbles to jazzy dialogue between the hands … with its moderation of expression and close attention to nuance and detail, [the piece] often had one imagining an atonal Amy Beach composing A Hermit Thrush at Eve in 2017. Oppens’s insight into the score, communicated through a varied tonal palette and keen-eared voicing, was a reminder of why composers from John Adams to Elliott Carter have queued up to write pieces for her.” – New York Classical Review
“Kaminsky’s music is full of fire as well as ice, written in an idiom that contrasts dissonance and violence with tonal beauty and meditative reflection. It is strong stuff.” – American Record Guide
“Laura Kaminsky’s The Great Unconformity begins with double stopping and continues with runs and percussion. Her music leaps from rock to rock and, like the voracious river, conforms to few man-made rules … The music is interesting and the sound crystal clear.” – Fanfare
Laura Kaminsky‘s strikingly intense diptych, Deception (with clarinetist Moran) Katz’s moody, richly burnished low register in tandem with the cello built an air of mystery and foreboding, occasionally punctured by the piano. The second movement worked clever variations via individual voices in a very Debussy-esque arrangement that also offered a nod to Shostakovich and possibly Penderecki as well.” – Lucid Culture
A Dream Revisited for amplified flute and percussion is delicate and imaginative.” – The New Yorker
“I was strongly drawn to [a] more serious work that uses dialogue as [its] main dramatic structure. In Laura Kaminsky’s Until A Name, based on Conversation by Elizabeth Bishop, the exchange is between rapid passage work and evocative long tones. Fascinated by the awareness of the breath within the sustained tones, I became a participant in the drama rather than an onlooker. Terri Sundberg’s playing is especially expressive at the climactic moment of stillness when a series of repeated notes begins the work’s denouement into a dissonant silence.” – New Music Connoisseur
A composer with an ear for the new and interesting [whose work is] colorful and harmonically sharp edged.” – The New York Times
In a gesture of typical good will, Laura Kaminsky (the driving force behind Musicians Accord) presented this free concert while inviting attendees to make contributions toward the 9/11 Relief Effort via the Accord’s charitable status. Suitably enough she programmed the concert as a reflection of her own and surely others’ concern for humanity. Her own River Music could not have been more pertinent, as it suggests her wide travels and love for music rooted in the soil and in the heart, as the program title conveys to us. The 17-minute work for flute, percussion and piano is made up of five movements, with a traditional balance of tempo, dynamics, and general musical character throughout; it closed the first part of the program in a rousing fashion … Ms. Kaminsky can create soft, evocative moods as naturally as she writes music that moves with force.”
extracted from a review in the New Music Connoisseur of Music of Earth and Spirit, a concert produced by Musicians Accord a month after 9/11
The highlight of the evening was undoubtedly Laura Kaminsky’s Homage to Havel, a tribute to the Czech Republic’s first president, Václav Havel. Kaminsky is a skilled composer who fully understands the capabilities and strengths of each instrument, combining sounds in a way that is both intriguing and unique. Her thought-provoking piece was electrifying throughout and Cygnus performed it with energetic confidence. – Feast of Music
Ms. Kaminsky’s substantial duo, ‘Interpolations on Utopia Parkway,’ reflected her contact with life in Africa, where the sense of how events move through time is so different from ours, and her piece engaged the listener in an unusual manner.” – New Music Connoisseur
“Not only a tone poem of nature at day’s end, Twilight Settings also depicts a world where twilight, and the inevitable darkness which follows, are harbingers of death. The music is very spare and evocative; traces of gamelan flicker in the percussion ostinatos, and some folkish triads — especially in the opening and closing songs — warm the soprano lines. The work ends effectively and beautifully.” – American Music
“Triftmusik (1991) is a colorful and sharp-edged evocation of an Alpine climb.” – The New York Times