Cleopatra
. . . a remarkable work, vigorous in gesture, imaginatively interconnected, exotic in color.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

Dark Mother
The work is as remarkable as the circumstances required: Vores is on a roll these days . . . this is an organic piece. It also calls for the kind of wildly imaginative, emotionallycharged virtuoso playing that it got.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer
 
Goback Goback
Vores’s striking music conjures up the ghost worlds of Schumann, or Mahler, or Benjamin Britten, only on hallucinogens . . . the music wants to surround us in dark woods, submerge us in a fathomless sea, disintegrate us into an ephemeral cloud. It’s a rare new-music event that makes me want to hear
each piece over again. And again.
The Boston Phoenix – Lloyd Schwartz

Goback Goback
The effect of Goback Goback was to be flung into a huge, pullulating Amazonian lushness. With only a
few instruments at his disposal, Vores gave you the sense that he had an infinite number of orchestrational palettes at hand. . . This is not a composer for whom ideas–or ways of expressing them–are slow in coming.
The Boston Globe – Richard Buell

Kreutzette
An oddity, pretty arcanely related to the Kreutzer Sonata, though cute in its zany way.
The Waterloo Gazette

Music For Bach to Walk  to Hear Buxtehude by
High spirits, culture-worship, and a mess of architectonic banana peels all rolled into one.
The Boston Globe – Richard Buell

Piano Sonata No.1
Vores uses an amalgam of approachable styles, with neo-classicism rubbing shoulders with uninhibited
note-cluster bravura, all of it suggesting a genuine love of the keyboard.
The Guardian

Quartet No.3
The Vores Third Quartet is a terrific piece that brings disparate components into harmony. . . There’s nothing exploitative about the Vores work, however, it’s celebratory, imaginative, touching, and fun.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

Six Songs on Poems of Margaret Atwood
Vores's settings fit Torgove's voice like a knife's sheath; they are alert to the harmony of every poem and
to every shift of tonality within.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

The Rainy Summer
The best of the five was the newest, Andy Vores’ All Souls’ Night, a shattering statement of loss cast
in simple, direct musical terms.
The Detroit Free Press

Twistification
. . . cohesive by instinct . . . an intensely lucid score propelled by optimism.
The Aberdeen Evening Ex press

Umberhulk
“You can hear water dripping from the tops of huge caverns into dead lakes,” the composer writes. So indeed you can. But you can also hear a wild, quick-changing play of rhythmic, motivic, timbral invention that’s fascinating in itself. Some really lightning-quick hand-eye coordination must have been required to get it
all on paper. We’re ever so glad he did. Vores is in his prime, he’s writing like this, and he’s here. Lucky us
The Boston Globe – Richard Buell

Uncertainty is Beautiful
Gil Rose's Boston Modern Orchestra Project opened its ninth season with an extremely ambitious and lively program: five vocal pieces by four very different living composers, all from different generations, ranging
from the edgy romantic irony of Andy Vores, in his late 40s, to the open-hearted tonality of Charles Fussell,
in his mid 60s). . . There wasn’t a dull moment. Vores is the most compelling of the generation of Boston-based composers after John Harbison, and he’s a striking text setter. The concert led off with the premiere
of his Uncertainty Is Beautiful — a pungent, impassioned cycle about love that gave even Mary Oliver’s gushy, sentimental prose poems some bite, though the high point was the central section, a shimmering setting of Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska’s ironic and haunting poem refusing to accept the notion
of "Love at First Sight" ("There were doorknobs and doorbells/where one touch had covered another/ beforehand"). The vocal sections are punctuated by short orchestral movements, dissonant Marches and glinting "Shards," with their undercurrent of pizzicati, and a one-word ("Ah") Duo. Soprano Kendra Colton
was at her very best, dedicating her radiant voice to the performance.
The Boston Phoenix – Lloyd Schwartz

Uncertainty is Beautiful
Conductor Gil Rose and his lively and indispensible band The Boston Modern Orchestra Project have stormed to the rescue of a significant but often overlooked genre -- music for solo voices and orchestra.
The world premiere last night was Andy Vores's Uncertainty Is Beautiful, a setting of passionate and
direct love poems by Mary Oliver and Wislawa Szymborska. Vores's elegantly fashioned music is
passionate and dodgy, which adds a layer of complexity. He wrote the cycle for soprano Kendra Colton,
who shone most brightly in the quieter, high-lying sections; sometimes he unfairly pitted her lower tones against the winds and brass. Colton's singing came straight from the heart.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

Urban Affair
It's quite a trick to use three instruments to tell the story of two people, but Vores carried it off; three, for once,
is not a crowd. Each member of the trio gets important solos, but there is also a real ensemble character.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

Weegee
Weegee . . . was both handsomely performed and handsomely received . . . Vores seems not only to have found the right grit-and-glamor, “urban” music tone to go with each photograph, but to have sensed exactly how long we should be looking at it. How elegant, right, yet surprising it all was.
The Boston Globe – Richard Buell

Wetherby Nocturne
. . . a strange but intermittently compelling piece . . . Its attraction is the louring atmosphere, the individuality of Vores’ voice, and the opportunity it gives to the pianist to be all the characters in a drama.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

What I Can't Kick
You could try to match what you were hearing to the composer's assertion that the thing was about addiction. You see, he'd been reading New York author Ann Marlowe's kicking-heroin-is-a-breeze recovery memoir, How to Stop Time. And this piece reminded him of what he went through trying to kick the cigarette habit
after 25 years off the things and, and . . . Almighty codswallop! Don't anybody believe a word of it!
What Vores has done here is to compose a very fine Piano Quartet–a vivid, imaginative, and
exciting piece . . . tightly crafted.
The Boston Globe – Richard Buell

World Wheel
If communicative urgency is central to your compositional agenda it helps to have something to say,
and Vores does–a lot.
The Boston Globe – Richard Dyer

World Wheel
It has large ambitions and an extensive musical vocabulary–Stockhausen, Copland and Beethoven mixed. Through-composed to a fault, its strengths are many; terrific choral writing with idiosyncratic voicings and beautiful full-bodied harmonies, elegant instrumental writing . . . not a moment of musical boredom the
whole night.
The Boston Herald – Keith Powers

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