press

It has been said, if you are going to believe your good reviews, then you must also believe your bad. In light of this, here are the best and worst clips:

the good

"Torke is a bright American hope, a vitally inventive composer"— Financial Times

"This is a composer with a completely devel­oped style, and has established himself as one of our truly great composers. He's an American treasure." —American Record Guide

"Michael Torke is one of the foremost compositional talents in America today." —Gramophone

"Michael Torke practically defined post-Minimalism, a music in which eclectic young composers utilize the repetitive structures of a previous generation to incorporate musical techniques from both the classical tradition and the contemporary pop world." —Mark Swed, The Los Angeles Times

"Torke is our Copland: the rare composer who combines staggering technical chops, a rigorous and uncompromising approach to the working-out of material, and the guts to shape that material into music with broad appeal and without irony."— American Record Guide

"In fact, Torke may turn out to be the true heir to Bernstein's populist throne rather than America's answer to Michael Nyman. Torke's is certainly music to confound snobs and give immense pleasure." —BBC Music Magazine

"a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation"—The New York Times

"some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years"—Gramophone

the bad

“We got kindergarten rhythm that fed a ladies'-tea-party idea of what Mendelssohn was about...W.H.Auden had a phrase for it when, pouring his tea out the window , he shocked the gathering with the appraisal, ‘Tepid urine.’ “ Village Voice

“...the Stravinsky estate should sue” —New York Magazine

"Torke, [Peter] Martins' Stravinsky, writes bad music." —Arlene Croce, The New Yorker

"...more monotonous and irritating than a Czerny five-finger exercise." —New York Magazine

“...a twenty-two-minute piece of breathtaking banality. It could figure on a P.D.Q. Bach program as a comedy portrait of a late-Romantic composer...” Andrew Porter, The New Yorker

“...almost completely without substance...In the program guide we were "respectfully requested" not to applaud at the conclusion of the mass; I found the temptation easy to resist.” Tim Page, Newsday

"The difference between Torke and Barber seems to be that Barber wrote music that meant something to him, that worked on the listeners' mind and emotions, that was compact, logical and passionate, while Torke is still playing games." —New York Newsday

"It's possible that Torke is putting us on, but Bronze is too pretentious and badly made to succeed even as a parody. Following this bizarre miscalculation, Samuel Barber's lush First Symphony, branded as conservative in 1936, seemed positively progressive and bursting with creative vitality." —New York Magazine