“If you can imagine the dense, perfumed chords of Olivier Messiaen’s piano music combined with the clangorous, insistent, near-pictorial tone-clusters of Frederic Rzewski’s ‘Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues’, you will have some idea of what Farrin’s work sounds like. Yet it transcends its derivations to leave a distinct impression of its own.”

-Tim Page, The Washington Post

Farrin’s SEA-DRIFT is an ecosystem of microscopic instrumental diversions around a structured center. Kurtág’s influence was evident. She drew on the use of tiny sounds and included spatially aware sonic decisions while producing complex material suited to stretching the possibilities of string playing without falling into a trap of the avant-garde extreme. SEA-DRIFT, Farrin told us, is influenced by the ‘experience of nature’. Maybe that is what gave it such universal appeal. Nature is here for all of us even if we come away with our own unique experiences.

One movement in particular was awesome. It was reminiscent of the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’, but in Farrin’s work the buzzing ostinato was not a cartoonish humanization, like in Rimsky-Korsakov’s piece. Instead, each string part (often played in slightly different patterns) blended together in a dense fabric of buzzing sounds, sometimes to the point of deliberate annoyance, like a swarm of gnats in one’s path on a humid day. At other moments, the buzz shifted into a beauteous swoon over which a player would seemingly move into another sonic room, leaving the buzz to play lyrical material in the distance.

SEA-DRIFT is a thoughtful work of singular depth. As it came to an end, it relied on the precise but loving touch of the Parker musicians to fulfill its demands: a stark but yearning cello trill, passages closing in on breathy brevity, silent moments growing ever longer. Eventually, the music disintegrated into the distance. The ecosystem disappeared, perhaps still heard elsewhere but lost to us. Farrin gives us that extraordinary question to end upon, or to remind us that nature, too, can disappear.

- Daniele Sahr, Seen and Heard

After listening to Kurtág, Farrin seems to take what remains and hollow it out into another piece of music. As the title suggests, she dug and dug into it. Like Kurtág, the sound's energy opens and closes. It drifts. In particular, the consciousness of perdendosi—the feeling of a person's soul gradually disappearing—felt like a reverberation of Kurtág.

I sat there, and I never became uncomfortable. I felt my body gradually disappear. After the concert, I got Suzanne's autograph. When I got home, I listened to one of Suzanne's recordings. I slept very well.

- Classicalsobi, Balse

“Offsetting these dreamily consonant fantasies was an appealingly tart harp solo, Suzanne Farrin’s “Polvere et Ombra” (2008), in which the juxtaposition of glissandos and brisk strumming effects created a richly tactile texture.”

- Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

“Suzanne Farrin’s This is the Story She Began, that title inspired by Ovid, has a fantasy-like construction, with a harmonic sensibility that suggests Messiaen.  It is music of conviction, power and no little beauty.”

- Peter Burwasser, Fanfare Magazine

Are these settings songs of unrequited love and the frailty of life and matter? If so, instead of fatalistic pessimism, we are left with a sense of warmth and optimism glowing at the core of each work, something that endures. Farrin shows compelling virtuosity in her writing for soloists, creating intimate, fragile and exposed situations. One feels that hardly anything is superfluous here, with every utterance finely chiselled. Farrin states that composing is an “unmasking” process for her, “taking away until a more essential place is revealed.” The resulting works are indeed stripped of unnecessary layers until we are left with distilled essence of a personal truth – a rare skill for an artist. One can only hope that Farrin continues to explore and expand her palette, venturing into writing for more varied instrumental forces and projecting her language onto a larger canvas.

- Xenia Pestova, I Care If you Listen

“…highly atmospheric and evocative colouring...”

-International Piano Magazine

“I sensed that this was music that has an integrity of its own.  It was ethereal and evocative, possessed of an aural shimmer.  Ms. Farrin has created a different kind of mallet for the vibraphone, which, when rubbed along the bars, elicited from it an otherworldly wash of sound.” 

-Southampton Press

‘Suzanne Farrin enters in with Tiny Spaces for string quartet in a concise, timbrally refined and traditionally musical language, from which a subtle tone-color harmony idiomatically comes into being under microtonal shadings.”

-Tiroler Tageszeitung