Anthony Cheung

A portrait of the American composer Anthony Cheung: six works written between 2005 and 2012, all in first recordings. The two largest, SynchroniCities and Dystemporal, frame the programme. Between them are four pieces from the years Cheung calls formative, full of discoveries and doubts, in which he found the language now recognisably his own.

Cheung was born in San Francisco in 1982. He studied at Harvard and Columbia, where he took his doctorate in 2010 with a dissertation on Ligeti's Hamburg Concerto, and his main composition teachers were Tristan Murail and Bernard Rands. He co-founded the Talea Ensemble in New York and has been its artistic director and pianist. Talea plays most of the disc under James Baker, and Cheung himself is the soloist in the piano piece. Dystemporal is a live recording by the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Susanna Mälkki, made at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in October 2012. The other sessions took place at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in November 2011 and at Oktaven Audio, Yonkers, in December 2012.

Windswept Cypresses (2005), for flute, viola, harp and percussion, was written in about ten days when Cheung was 23. It reflects on the Monterey cypresses of the Point Lobos reserve south of San Francisco, and in 2008 it won both the first prize and the audience prize at the Henri Dutilleux competition. Centripedalocity (2008), for seven players, treats musical gravity in three sections, with materials pulled, spun and deflected. Like Running the (Full) Gamut, it is interested in groove and pulse, and the piano piece drops bass lines and motifs from a warped post-bop world. SynchroniCities, a Koussevitzky Foundation commission for Talea, blends recorded sounds and an auto-tuned live piano with the ensemble.

Dystemporal, for twenty-three musicians, was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain for its Tremplin series and premiered on 4 October 2012. The title refers to the distorted way time is handled and perceived. The first section turns like a spiral over grooves that change at every return and never settle, while the last works with rhythmic cycles in canon at different speeds. Cheung sees it as a summary of his earlier interests and a project with its own idiosyncratic aims.

CD, Wergo WER 7343 2, released in 2016.