“Naxos’s previous release of music by clarinettist-composer Derek Bermel, ‘Migrations’, impressed me with its varied, colourful demeanor, bracing eclecticism, and ‘Bernsteinian élan’. … [‘Intonations’ is] recommended… for a musical voice beyond the run of the mill.”

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“Derek Bermel describes his "A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace" as an ode to Bela Bartok, coming to New York as a refugee and finding alienation in a foreign land.”

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"The sound of this CD balances familiarity and newness, with a modern jazz twist ringing in certain style clusters. The roller-coaster-like musically expressed emotions run deep and reach high. The composer juggles combinations of instruments, gestures, new and old rhythms, harmonies and vocal melodies. In this way, Bermel brings rich strands of music history together with his own artistic direction. This merging point reaches everyone listening to Migrations."

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“Besides being a composer, Mr. Bermel is a formidable clarinetist who in his early days played jazz and funk. “Migrations,” an album of his work, includes “A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace,” a vibrant homage to Bartok. This, the first movement, is a dizzying melting pot of folklike rhythms, droning tunes and pungent modernist harmonies, spiked with bursts of wailing jazz.”

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"Try and pigeonhole Derek Bermel at your peril: the list of composers who are as versatile and adept at drawing on diverse musical sources as he is a short one, indeed. And one of the immediate pleasures of any of his recordings – Naxos’s new Migrations album, for example – is to experience just how deftly he makes such disparate kinds of music as big band, rap, and Greek folk his own.... In all, it’s a grand celebration of one of America’s great living composers at the top of his game."

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“…A wah wah trumpet plays in duet with a gentle rocking figure from the piano during the enticing start to "Migrations," the new disc of music by Derek Bermel on Naxos. The music is tuneful, spacious and inviting. Soon a big band joins in, the tempo picks up and you know you're in for a good ride. The Albany Symphony is in the mix somewhere, but the sound is dominated by solos from members of the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, also Ted Nash on saxophones and the composer on clarinet.”

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“The three works here are nothing if not exciting, compelling attention from the very first bars… unlike most attempts to fuse these jazz and classical genres, Bermel succeeds with Bernsteinian élan. His orchestration is vivid – with touches of Lalo Schifrin, Ives, Copland and a number of jazz stars (Thelonious Monk not least) – but always seems an organic part of the composition, growing out of the jazzy harmonies and melodies, rather than something grafted on as an afterthought.”

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“…There were many moments of subtly seething undercurrents, some sections with Latin beats and occasional tender, lovely moments. The writing for the singers was very skillful without standout arias, as both women expressed the stresses of Esperanza’s coming of age — gaining and losing friends, belonging, sprouting hips and discovering boys.”

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“Bermel, who conducted the piece, writes sensitively for strings. In his second movement, the work’s emotional core, he has the lower strings play an accompaniment while the violins pour forth a long-limbed melody of quite stunning beauty, as if the birds were staging an aerial ballet. Beauty in motion is perhaps what “Murmurations” is all about.”

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“I have heard several works by clarinetist and composer Derek Bermel and am a big fan. His music always has an exciting and ‘contemporary’ sound that is readily influenced by the worlds of jazz or rock. Such is the case here”

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“The Bernstein, which Bermel played from memory, has many of the composer’s later hallmarks – bright-edged, theatrical melodies in the clarinet line, a rich textured piano part, and ample rhythmic variety in both – and Bermel, with solid support from the pianist Peter Basquin, gave it a vital, persuasive performance.”

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“Derek Bermel, the brilliantly versatile composer and clarinetist who is the New Century Chamber Orchestra's featured composer this year, began his stint on Thursday night by trying to compress all of cosmology into 18 minutes of music. The physics of it was above my pay grade, but the music was characteristically skillful and imaginative.” 

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Recently, the American Composer Orchestra gave the NY premiere of Derek Bermel's Mar de Setembro, featuring vocalist Luciana Souza. New York Times critic Steve Smith called Bermel's score "unambiguously luscious music," and noted he is a "versatile, respectful chameleon...[who] weds impressionism, bossa nova, tango, waltz and more to evocative ends..."

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"Dust Dances," the program's opener, which Bermel composed in 1994 after a sojourn in Ghana, where he studied the gyil, a marimba-like instrument with a buzzing "blue note" sound. Friday, with each swaggering blast of trombone, you could almost see elephants on the horizon...Welcome to Cabrillo.” 

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“Following a recent release of Derek Bermel's music for full orchestra ( the excellent album Voices on the BMOP Sounds label), this new collection focuses on Bermel's work for that quintessential contemporary sinfonietta, Alarm Will Sound. This collection of Bermel's music provides a helpful point of entry for those curious to know just what has made this composer so consistently stand out: his music's fusion of quasi-minimalist beat-based sensibilities with a dizzying diversity of popular and/or indigenous sound sources from across the globe.”

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"By its very definition, Canzonas Americanas is eclectic. His language eclectic, using a song form somewhat atypical for contemporary ensemble music, Bermel wisely mixes very different languages and musical styles, consistently maintaining a collective and multi-voiced conversation."

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“…all this makes Bermel a singularly lively creative presence and a great musical citizen, witty, generous, and resourceful in equal measure. Yet one still can’t help but wonder: what does such wide-ranging experience mean for Bermel’s own compositional practice?… Well, if Bermel’s latest full-length portrait disc Canzonas Americanas is any evidence… with his objective, almost ethnographic approach to composition thoroughly assimilating the ‘source materials’ variously gathered from his years of musical globetrotting, listeners are in great hands with Bermel.”

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“It's hard to know what to be more dazzled by in the music of composer Derek Bermel - the range of stylistic voices he cultivates or the profusion of ingenuity, beauty and wit he brings to everything he touches. This superb new compilation by the New York ensemble Alarm Will Sound shows off the many sides of Bermel's musical personality...”

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“The Guardian reviews Derek Bermel's Canzonas Americanas, pieces which it says "gleefully rampage across traditional stylistic boundaries, appropriating what they need."

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The Washington Post classical music critic gives her take on the year in music.

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“Maybe it's because Bermel's music demands the same rhythmic vigor as a Reich score, and the same screwed-up pop sensibility as Brittelle or Aphex Twin, or the fact that Bermel's musical language is nearly as eclectic as everything Alarm Will Sound has played up to now.”

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"The works on Canzonas Americanas reflect Bermel’s characteristic eclecticism and exemplary compositional technique. Despite the music’s layered complexity, his harmonies remain resonant, his textures clean, his orchestration radiant. Bermel possesses an uncommonly discerning ear in an American music scene that too often prizes trends over technique."

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"Mar de Setembro" is a short set of five songs to texts by the late Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade and written for the Brazilian jazz singer Luciana Souza. Bermel. who is LACO's composer in residence, has produced a small gem." 

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“You might say that Derek Bermel… is the quintessential 21st-century musician. A composition student of Henri Dutilleux, Louis Andriessen, and William Bolcom (among others), Bermel is also an accomplished jazz clarinetist, has traveled the world exploring folk traditions, and performs (singing and playing keyboards and percussion) in a rock band. This staggering eclecticism is apparent in all four works recorded here…. Given the very wide range of inspiration at work in these four pieces, the consistency and coherence of Bermel’s musical language is particularly impressive. He’s definitely a composer I’m eager to hear more from.”

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"To count up the musical influences in the works on Derek Bermel’s new album, Voices, featuring the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, would prove impossible. He is a composer as comfortable mixing jazzy trombone riffs with plunky, Asian harp-piano duets, as with combining eerie portamento violins and Stravinsky-like primitive rhythms. To say that Bermel’s music is adventurous would be an understatement.... Voices is fun in a way classical music often is not."

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“When the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center decided to celebrate its history of commissioning new works in January, it made the peculiar decision to present truncated or excerpted versions of many scores it was supposedly honoring. Among its oddest choices was to insist that Derek Bermel's ''Soul Garden,'' a 13-minute work composed in 2000, be trimmed to eight minutes.”

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“Derek Bermel is one of those musicians with so much talent in so many areas that he could easily be mistakenly labeled a dilletante. Afterall, he writes chamber, symphonic, dance, theater and pop works, and is a terrific clarinetist, pianist and conductor, who is just as comfortable with jazz and rock as he is with classical. But, Soul Garden, a new CD of Bermel's chamber works, demonstrates just how serious a composer Bermel is and how well he has assimilated his varied musical experiences and made then uniquely his own.”

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