Escher String Quartet, Paulina Swierczek, Miranda Cuckson, Jacob Greenberg - Anthony Cheung: All Roads (2022)

Composer Anthony Cheung releases All Roads, a follow up to FCR215 Cycles and Arrows. Featuring performances by the Escher Quartet, violinist Miranda Cuckson, soprano Paulina Swierczek, and pianists Jacob Greenberg, Gilles Vonsattel, and Cheung himself, All Roads encapsulates Cheung's penchant for drawing on broad sources of inspiration and filtering them through an incisive and discriminating compositional process to produce substantial, structurally airtight works.

​​There is a rich continuum of possibility when a composer references a pre-existing piece in a new composition. One can present the material literally, as in a set of variations, or one can subsume it entirely, using it as an unseen point of contact for the generation of material for the piece. On All Roads for piano and string quartet, Anthony Cheung leans towards the more obscured end of the spectrum as he uses Billy Strayhorn’s poignant Lotus Blossom as a muse and a structural guide for the piece. The result is an infusion of sorts - the melodic and harmonic components of Strayhorn’s iconic song have seeped into Cheung’s composition, traced obliquely into momentary gestural contours and echoed in strains of distant memory. The pervasive melancholy in Strayhorn’s original work is at the essence of All Roads, as heard in the searching quality of the opening movement and the subsequent “detours.” But Cheung also pushes against its expressive edges, exploring which emotional corners the material will allow him to inhabit, such as the accumulating dialogue of swells in “Forking Paths,” the restless figuration in “Estuary,” and the insistent angularity of the final movement, “Convergence.”
Tracklist
1. Cheung: All Roads: Introduction. First Detour (1:38)
2. Cheung: All Roads: I. Forking Paths (3:31)
3. Cheung: All Roads: Interlude. Second Detour (1:48)
4. Cheung: All Roads: II. Circuitous Routes (Winding Passacaglias) (4:10)
5. Cheung: All Roads: Interlude. Third Detour (0:57)
6. Cheung: All Roads: III. Estuary (3:04)
7. Cheung: All Roads: Interlude. Fourth Detour (2:09)
8. Cheung: All Roads: IV. Convergence (7:56)
9. Cheung: Elective Memory: I. Aubade, for a Golden Age (6:42)
10. Cheung: Elective Memory: II. Broken Scherzo. Tripping Up, Falling Down (6:23)
11. Cheung: Elective Memory: III. Nocturne. Half-Remembered (5:42)
12. Cheung: Character Studies: I. Dramatis Personae (4:00)
13. Cheung: Character Studies: II. — (5:00)
14. Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: Three Grades of Evil (7:53)
15. Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: Hear the Sledges with the Bells (1:53)
16. Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: What Is Translation? (2:30)
17. Cheung: All Thorn, but Cousin to Your Rose: How Sad Your Apparition Is to Me (4:43)