Meditation"Among the glories of Smith's recital series have been unusual repertoire and world premieres, Sunday's premiere was "Meditation" by Ellen Bender. All the musical parameters of the work are derived from the word "peace." The music demonstrates that, in the right hands, the most complex forms of musical organization can be a tool for personal expression. The work opens and closes with quiet serenity, but the music is also disturbing and unresolved - the composer reminds us that peace has yet to be achieved." -- Richard Dyer,
Boston Globe 9-30-2004 |
Dickinson Songs"Ellen Bender offered "Dickinson Songs," a cycle of Emily Dickinson settings that focused on the poet's strategies of quiet understatement.
"The songs are spare but intense, more second Viennese school in orientation than overtly American. Harmonically exploratory, they invariebly return to their moorings at the end." -- Richard Dyer, Boston Globe 9-8-2000 |
Solitudes"Bender's piece is called "Solitudes," and it is a series of seven short character pieces inspired, she writes, by short stories by Goffredo Parise. The music is quiet, precise, interior, and based in a singing line. A movement called "Mystery" is the most interesting because it holds the strongest contrast: bustling urban music suddenly gives way to a contemplation of larger meanings. Bender is ingenious in moving the focus around the various players of the quartet . . ." -- Richard Dyer,
Boston Globe 3-27-`1997 |