“Bringing out the shattering honesty of Michelangelo’s poetry, Ms. Farrin set the words to music of aching intensity, sung here with vulnerability and yearning by Mr. Costanzo. Images leapt out, as when the poet declares it a mistake to praise desolate, dark night, “so consumed by jealousy that a mere firefly can wage war on it.”
-Anthony Tommasini, NYTimes
read the full NYTimes review here
“like field recordings from inside the cerebral cortex.”
-Doyle Armbrust, Timeout Chicago
read the full Timeout Chicago review here
“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
“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
“…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