“Meighan Stoops was clearly having a fantastic evening, particularly in Derek Bermel’s unusual Coming Together (no relation to the Rzewski). She and cellist André Emelianoff brought the piece to life with precision that had me chuckling. Constructed mostly of short, sighing glissandi, the piece had Stoops clarinet in an almost sexual rapport with Emelianoff’s cello. Bermel, like many of the composers on this program, is clearly fascinated by jazz, and this work benefited from its interpreters clearly feeling the same. David DeSantis Make it Stop, an entertaining exercise in obsessive figures for the clarinet set against an equally intense piano part, also showed Stoops and McMillen at their riveting best in the works pulsing colors.”

“[Coming Together is] a piece which is at times (surely intentionally) laugh-out-loud humorous, it is difficult to conceive this as anything other than a ‘tour de force’ of performance art, where the gestural vocabulary is write large in a musical equivalent of slapstick.”