Symphony No 1, Washington Post, 8. II. 2015
The symphony, my introduction to her music, seemed to fly by. Its 45 minutes of sometimes tender, sometimes brutal and chaotic, but always intriguing textures and rhythmic intricacies made architectural sense, and her immersion into Jewish, Gypsy and occasionally plain-song modalities gave its tonal harmonies an esoterically dark hue.
Its four movements, slow-fast-slow-fast, made huge demands on both winds and percussion, and Zimmerman, who led here with a lot less athleticism but more clarity than in the Dvorak, had both these sections impressively on their toes. Calm, baroque-like canons unfolded beneath off-balance trumpet rhythms in the second movement. Copland-like English horn lines emerged cleanly from long passages of string fog in the third, and the aggressive percussiveness of the fourth movement paused just long enough for a moment of Bach chorale to shine through.
Joan Reinthaler