Reviews
Recordings
Performances
Recordings
ELEANOR CORY, OF MERE BEING: Visions, Play Within a Play, Of Mere Being, Interviews, Bouquet; CRI CD 885
"All of this was written between 1996 and 1999. Eleanor Cory (b. 1943) is beginning to be recognized as a major force in contemporary music. This is a little surprising, since she doesn't conform to any popular “ism” but writes music of serious intent in a sometimes dissonant idiom, including everything from references to jazz to serial elements.
The pieces included here are for varied ensembles. Visions includes flute, clarinet, horn, and string trio. It is a strong piece in three parts. Of Mere Being sets a Wallace Stevens poem for chorus and brass quintet, used in an atmospheric manner. Play Within a Play is a piano solo where a set of consonant variations is enclosed in more dissonant surroundings. Interviews is a conversation between viola and piano, while Bouquet includes two members of each orchestral section in a three-part work including jazz references and a good deal of variety. Cory's willingness to use contrasting styles may stem from her work with Meyer Kupferman. At any rate, she writes interesting music, and this well-played selection is welcome."
Moore, "American Record Guide," May/June, 2002
"At its best, in Visions for Six Players (1998), Eleanor Cory's music offers what might be considered a consonant version of the instrumental dramas that make up most of Elliott Carter's second period. Cory assigns each of her six players characteristic thematic material that is related but slightly different for each instrument, which she then combines into a contrapuntal dialog of considerable beauty. Constructed in three movements, slow/fast/slow-slow-fast, and scored for three winds with three strings, the piece is 18 minutes of sublime chamber music. The slightly later Bouquet for Eight Players (1999) is more diffuse and incorporates jazz rhythms and phrasing, as does the solo piano work Play Within a Play.... Play Within a Play, structurally an introduction, theme and variations, and coda, really does come across as a very well made jazz solo of the pastel sort that would impress but not disturb in any piano bar in the country.
Interviews, for viola and piano, is a stronger work, being in part an investigation of how those two very different instruments are played....
Performances are expert, and the recorded sound is wonderfully clear."
John Story, "Fanfare," May/June, 2002
ELEANOR CORY,IMAGES: Pas de Quatre, Canyons, Ehre, Hemispheres, Soundspells Productions CD 116
"Cory has studied with Kupferman, as well as with Charles Wuorinen and Chou Wen-chung. She bears many of the qualities of her mentors in thoughtful, expert, uncompromising craft...Influences as disparate as Ives and Berg...lend the latter (Canyons) (1993) decidedly urban and urbane overtones."Philip George, "Twentieth Century Music," December, 1996
"...a CD rich in warmth and lyrical beauty. Ms Cory characterizes herself as a composer interested in the elements of contrast, no matter what the sources of her inspiration. But her contrasts are never rude or obvious...the overall character of the piece (Pas de Quatre) remains gentle, even ephemeral... In Canyons Cory sensed an iconic connection with the NYC skyline, purportedly to compare natural beauty with human complexity. But this subtly scored piece for chamber orchestra also offers some almost imperceptible changes in texture and dynamics." Barry Cohen,
"The Music Connoisseur," Vol. 4, #4
AMERICAN MASTERS: ELLEN TAAFFE ZWILICH/ELEANOR CORY:
Designs, Apertures, Profiles, CRI CD 621
"Cory's music is consistently stimulating."James H. North, "Fanfare," May/June, 1993
"Written in 1986, Cory's Profiles is a trio for clarinet, cello and piano that emphasizes the lower registers and mysterious qualities of these instruments. Apertures, from 1984, is a virtuoso and at times jazzy piano solo. Designs, a piano trio cast in a single variation-like movement that counterposes mournful or lyrical solos on each instrument with thickets of contrapuntal elaboration."Lehman, "American Record Guide," July/August, 1993
"Cory often sounds pointillistic, slow and brooding. Both composers have distinct musical voices and something of real value to communicate in their art."Richard Halley, "On the Air," October, 1993
AMERICAN COMPOSERS' ALLIANCE RECORDING AWARD: Lennon, Biscardi, Cory, Wuorinen, CRI RECORDS SD 459
"Eleanor Cory's trio (Designs) is definitely more cerebral, with its stark contrasts, minimal immediate repetition of sound or gesture, and variegated textures. She does unusual things with the standard piano-trio instrumentation..."
Paul Rapoport, "Fanfare," March/April 1983
"The sections of Eleanor Cory's Designs are... clearly articulated, and each of them is a set of mini-variations...the score of the work looks fiendishly difficult, involving chord progressions which become increasingly complex."Michael Meckna, "American Record Guide," December, 1982
EDWARD COHEN/ELEANOR CORY: Profiles, Apertures, CRI SD 542
"Profiles presents the trio of clarinet, cello, and piano is a series of varying frofies - come mysterious, some direct; some abstract, some more concrete and ostinato based -utilizing a wide range of the instrumental possibilities abailable to this ensemble...Cory employs a much more chromatic language (than Cohen) with sharper, more intes=nse gestures...Apertures for solo piano is also concerned with musics of different intensities, the "apertures of the title being the quiet, cintemplative sections ina piece of otherwise intense, driving textures. The realtionship of the apertures to the more active music can be heard as slow motion before or after the real-time activity."Bruce M. Creditor, "Sonneck Society Bulletin," Vol. XVI, No. 1, Spring, 1990
Performances
CHASING TIME (2000)
"Eleanor Cory's Chasing Times is another work that brings up relationships. In this study - or perhaps an apter word would be "anti-study" - of the rigors of time in music, she has produced a complex composition in which seemingly uncooperative partners are actually working very much in tandem with each other, not an easy idea to pull off. 'It's an idea that lends itself to virtuosic performance' [MG] and both partners surely demonstrated that. Beyond the bracing notes themselves one cannot help but see a comment on our lives in the piece. We all seem to be in a kind of isolation, each of us moving at our own pace, that we lose sight of that master of our existence - time. Because time is of the essence in musical partnership, it takes a musical person to come to grips with that idea."
BLC with Mark Greenfest, New Music Connoisseur, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2006
MIRRORS
"Eleanor Cory's 'Mirrors' (2006) benefited from a three-movement structure that guaranteed greater contrast and variety than in the other works. Its reflective central movement, "Refractions," offered a striking, melancholy violin solo, played by Linda Quan."
Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 17, 2006
CANYONS"Canyons was awarded Honorable Mention in the 1992 New Jersey Composer's Guild Competition...This is a mood-setting piece, with various activities of nature presented by instruments...."Nancy Plum, "Town Topics," Princeton, N,J., May 6, 1992
"Inspired by a trip to Bryce Canyon, Canyons is an atmospheric piece, with beautiful sonorities and incomplete melodies floating in a cloud of quiet activity...The whole comes off neither as a grandiose landscape nor as a dark melodrama of the soul, but something more complex: a balance of repose and unease...it remains a strong, highly individual statement, with a distinctly American sound. Traces of Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, and Elliott Carter influences are evident throughout the piece."Carlton Wilkinson, "The Times", Princeton, N.J., May 5, 1992
APERTURES
"Eleanor Cory's Apertures is a knotty ambitious... ultimately compelling work for solo piano..."Tim Page, "The New York Times," 1991
TAPESTRY
"Cory's work began with a series of sonic accumulations whizzing by the audience's heads. Pure tones punctuated accretions of harmony and disharmony. At the corner of almost every measure lurked a surprise: a crescendo undercut or a section suddenly in or out of time. The tonal feelings of Tapestry ranged from reticence to apprehensiveness, with occasional recourse to angst and relief.."
Kevin Post, "Press," Glassboro, N.J.
OCTAGONS
"Eleanor Cory's Octagons was a well crafted work that's abstruse... with moments of great beauty. The work is meant to convey geometric shapes both linearly and harmonically. Along with a fine use of winds and very effective use of the guitar, the piece set forth a straightforward employment of non-tonal vocabulary without being stilted."
Steven Block, "Market Square,"Pittsburgh, Pa., March 24, 1982
SUITE A LA BRECQUE
"Eleanor Cory"s Suite a la Brecque looked the crudest of the four, yet in performance it revealed a most acute ear for sonority; the widely spaced chords and jagged lines of the very slow third movement picked sounds from the instruments which I had never heard before, as if the composer had just lighted upon a unique combinations of overtones at the top of the keyboard, drawn from the vast range of possibilities created by the notes struck in the bass register."
Nicholas Kenyon, "The New Yorker," December 3,1979
TRIO FOR FLUTE, OBOE, AND PIANO
"Eleanor Cory's Trio, in which flute alternated with piccolo, and oboe with English horn, had a good deal of dramatic movement and sense of instrumental relationships. It was able to hold the attention quite easily,"
Raymond Erickson, "The New York Times," June 12, 1977
WAKING for Soprano and Ten Instruments
"Eleanor Cory's Waking - a world premiere - was more ambitious. Its setting of a poem by Muriel Rukeyser for soprano and 10 players was often as vivid as the text, whether dreamily, as at the beginning, or pungently when reflecting a city's image. The vocal line, with its big leaps, kept plunging and getting lost in the instrumental sonorities, which made one think, odd though it may seem, of the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Otherwise, Miss Cory....is a composer with a fine poetic sensibility."
Raymond Ericson, "The New York Times," Sunday, December 21, 1975
"Eleanor Cory's Waking also received a convincing performance by soprano Janet Steele and the ten instrumentalists. Cory's twenty-minute setting of Muriel Rukeyser's "This Morning" is a gutsy, violent piece which emphasized dense sonorities and constantly changing moods. The slow unfolding of the opening harmony and its reoccurrence toward the end were among the work's most impressive moments."
B.S. "High Fidelity/Musical America, 1979