Andrew List, Composer

Press

Kalistos Chamber Orchestra
April 24, 2005, Edward M. Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA, USA

David Cleary, New Music Connoisseur, Spring/Summer 2005

The Violin Concerto (2004) is one of Andrew List's finest compositions. Like the McDonald, it relies on structures both nonstandard and telling as well as a deftly elucidated sound world that is scalar yet non-triadic. Motivically, the music is as tight as a weight-lifter's muscles. Scoring is vibrant and instrumental writing idiomatic. And the work unfolds in a manner both logical and inventive. In short, it's a terrific entry well worth revisiting.

Duo Diorama: Minghuan Xu (violin) Winston Choi (piano)
May 1, 2005, Edward M. Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA, USA

David Cleary, www.newmusicon.org/reviews2005/duodiorama.htm

Andrew List's Fantasy for Violin and Piano (2004) possess a scale-based sound world beholden to Debussy and Copland but does not have an old-fashioned structure. List's Fantasy employs a loosely articulated yet palpable ABCA construct that contains attractively showy virtuosic material.

Daniel Schene Pianist
February 27,2003 Tsai Performance center Boston University Boston, MA USA

David Cleary new Music Connoisseur: Summer 2003

Sonata Nr. 2 “Elegy for September 11th” by Andrew List was the largest and most ambitious of the recent works heard. It also employed the most dissonant harmonic language, though was tonally focused enough to admit stacked perfect fourth material, octatonic scalar fragments, scalar figurations and jazzy upper tertian sonorities. There is much to commend here especially in the humorous yet intense scherzo and the expressive slow movement and finale coda the last of which is warmly heartfelt without being maudlin.

Six Bagatelles for String Trio, performed by The Concordia String Trio Frederic Bednarz (violin) Leslie Perna (viola) Darry Dolezal (cello)

The Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival Irasburg Vt. USA
William Anderson, July 2003

Andrew List’s Six Bagatelles for String Trio was one of the most striking works I’ve heard by a young composer in many years. Remembering George Crumb’s beautiful overtone filigree in Voice of the Whale, I was struck by List’s use of a similar technique in his Bagatelles, but he did no stop at one level of scrutiny of his overtone material. A one-dimensional presentation of that material would render it mere effect, decoration. List let that material be effect and decoration momentarily, offering the benefits of effect and decoration their due, as we don’t scorn sumptuous decorations and wonderful effects; but he probed, examined and developed that material in various surprising and always interesting ways and at various speeds. By taking us through this development, he demonstrated that what is offered at first as sumptuous may prove in the end to be both sumptuous and portentous. And so, as much as we are true hedonists and epicureans, we find ourselves, nevertheless, after the work is all over, no longer mere hedonists, but remade, malleable, and awaiting further growth and transformation. The piece should be performed often and recorded so we may get to know it still better.