The combination of intellectual acuity and visceral emotion that shines from Douglas Boyce’s music makes him a very special voice indeed… Boyce’s ferocious curiosity about the very nature of sound, and music, creates works of art that are compelling. They each require performers of the very highest caliber, and that is exactly what they receive here…
Colin Clarke, Fanfare
on The Hunt by Night
Boyce meticulously blends the instruments together in a way that nearly redefines the idea of chamber music, while keeping the listener enthralled for the entire journey… [H]is always unique vision embraces poetry, painting and philosophy as he draws from primitive techniques that are modernized for the many players present.
Take Effect Reviews
on The Hunt by Night
Douglas Boyce demonstrates an affinity for connecting music of the past with an individual contemporary voice… Boyce moves easily between technical fluency and emotional resonance, making Hunt by Night a most satisfying collection of his music.
Christian B. Carey, Sequenza 21
on The Hunt by Night
It is a music that is bracing, beautifully conversant in depicting the memory of image and word. It is a work of convincing, excellent fettle… thrillingly dissecting musical possibility. "A Chamber Modern gem, it all comes to that. It is serious business.
Gapplegate Classical-Modern
Music Review
Boyce grasps and projects in his own music a ferocity of C.S. Peirce's faith in the mind itself… furious verticals with an entwined horizontal… [and] occasional hints of a sense of play, even of fun… There is space in all this abstraction for beauty. Vastly stimulating on all levels, whether intellectual or emotional.
Colin Clarke, Fanfare
on Some Consequences
of Four Incapacities
This is seriously engaging and masterfully developed music. It hooked this listener immediately…a powerful and exciting piece of chamber music.
Allan J. Cronin, New Music Buff
on Some Consequences
of Four Incapacities
Rapidly shifting weather fronts seemed to move through Douglas Boyce’s “Bird-like Things in Things Like Trees,” as Mr. Fingland, Ms. Ouzounian and Ms. Yu created an alluring array of sounds that evoked the movement of birds, and the branches they sit on, more than their actual song and call.
Corinna da Fonesca-Wollheim
The New York Times
Ms. Kudo was joined by Ms. Cuckson, Mr. Beck and the violist Jessica Meyer for Mr. Boyce’s Piano Quartet No. 1 (2008), in which slowly shifting string textures led to more violent passages, working themselves out through juxtapositions of restless rhythms and more lyrical gestures.
Zachary Woolfe.
The New York Times
Tenor Robert Baker delivered two songs from Douglas Boyce's "Book of Songs" that can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well written and insightful. And Boyce could hardly ask for a finer interpreter than Baker, accompanied by the brilliant Lura Johnson-Lee on piano.
Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post
The Boyce, composed in 2003 for counter)induction's core lineup, creates its magic through continually shifting juxtapositions of antique and new. The ''Homme Armé'' theme is at the piece's heart all along, but the pianissimo descending slides, tapping sounds, eerie harmonies and spiky variations keep the spirit of the piece in the 21st century.
Allan Kozinn
The New York Times
Mr. Boyce's ''102nd and Amsterdam,'' for violin, viola and cello, which received its premiere, begins with a long episode of intensely soft squiggles, glissandos and shimmers. Once in a while a moaning rumination for the cello or an aborted melody for the violin break through and bring the diffuse harmonies into focus, though some fitful middle sections also threaten the uneasy calm.
Anthony Tommasini.
The New York Times
Inspired by the “kaleidoscopic rhetoric” of his father, Mr. Boyce offered an equally voluble and intriguing new work, String Trio: "102nd & Amsterdam", that opens with ghostly harmonics, before being interrupted by a violent middle section that eventually evaporates. On viola, Jessica Meyer joined Ms. Woodward-Page and Ms. Kudo for this high-energy romp.
Bruce Hodges
International Concert Review
The analysis, the breaking apart into observable bits, of the music, continues with “Deixo / Sonata” as a kind of meditation on the ‘natural’ rhetoric of the classical form and how it provides a context for the gestures and movements of the performers, playing upon reception and form as the possible basis of the dissolution of authorship.
David Murrieta,
A Closer Listen
Spacious fugal tradeoffs between voices lead to a creepy dance of sorts that quickly descends to a furtive sway, rises to a crescendo with hints of ragtime and old-world Romanticism and then a neat false ending.