Reviews
“...Illuminate thrives above all on the physical sensations of music-making. You listen to the sounds, but you also feel them crawling up your calf, tickling your funny bone and popping implosively somewhere just behind your head. It’s a joyous, immersive roller-coaster ride.”
The San Francisco Chronicle
The Daily Telegraph
“...the brilliant ten-minute New Geometry from Katherine Balch had a glow and poise and electric tension that really set one’s imagination in motion.”
The San Francisco Chronicle
“...just as notable is the skill with which Balch writes for the orchestra, filling her score with engaging instrumental knickknacks and nuggets of imaginative whimsy that come at the listener from every corner of the stage. She’s like some kind of musical Thomas Edison — you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas... the concerto’s lustrous, beating heart is its second movement, after the Capriccio No. 6 of Paganini. Here the violinist does almost nothing but sustain a long trill — but it’s a trill full of color and variety, which the soloist turns as if holding a jewel up to the light. The orchestra, meanwhile, whispers sweet enchantments into the audience’s ear, from little ticktock insinuations to gently smeared tonal harmonies. It’s a short but breathtakingly beautiful stretch...”
Oregon Artswatch
“...Märkl also issued a light-hearted warning: ‘there will be no melody, but very beautiful sound experiences, very unique.’ ...Balch’s music was sparse and, as promised, amelodic. Yet it was a compelling amelodicism, a shimmering sonic blanket quilted from microswaths of richly colored acoustic fabrics, harmonic in an aggressively non-functional way, halfway between the John Adamses. Waves of dazzling brass, swelling out from muted trumpets and trombone glissandi, surging across the stage to the horns. A sine tone emerged from a pair of intent trumpets and threaded its way around the orchestra through wavering winds and spectralist strings...”
SF Classical Voice
“…Balch’s flittering string devices reminded me of the origami-delicate writing found in the quartets of Georg Haas, one of her teachers. Superimposed on this, though, wild brass glissandos and a healthy sprinkling of jazz harmony lent the piece a surprising levity, especially in light of its technical complexity. Balch has the ability to compose intellectually stimulating but emotionally transparent textures, of which a tight-voiced, legato string ascent before the climax provided the most shining example… ”
Seen and Heard International
“Scored for flute and piano, it is a spellbinding work that opens with a nervous energy that soon subsides into relative stillness…The transfixing sounds became the musical equivalent of thousands of random, iridescent flashes of light that punctuate the dark.”
I Care If You Listen
“Balch’s exquisite sound world in the first moments of the piece was constituted by layers of airy, fluttery sounds brushed across surfaces and across the strings inside the piano…”
Previews
Noozhawk Santa Barbara
“Katherine Balch is a fascinating composer, of the newer sort...there is an a-temporal lack of forward motion in much that I have heard, but I would not call it eternity, or even stillness. She often seems governed by the duration and cycle of inhale/exhale. As the Lovin’ Spoonful once sang, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it sure is soft and strong.’”
SF Classical Voice
“…Cue the Swiss Alps. Right after Balch tackled many new works at once, including a violin concerto, a double bass septet, and a string quartet, she spent days in solitude hiking the Alps, in June 2019. She trekked from hut-to-hut along snow-smattered trails, singing melodies aloud…”