Music critic Bernard Jacobson in his review for Seen and Heard International writes that “Philadelphia Voices” “comes across as a creation open to the world and indeed drawing on an omnivorous variety of materials ranging from the literary, by way of quotations from our contemporaries, to evocations of visual, social, and traditional elements that vividly express the character of this one specific corner of the world.
One reaction that I think few listeners will have to Philadelphia Voices would be to accuse it of gentility. The piece is a gigantic jamboree. It does not hold back, in the challenging context of the world as it is, from skewering some aspects of the city’s past and present, though these are vastly overweighted by the celebration of all that makes this such a great, genial, humane, and still improving city.”
We love that Jacobson gives a special mention to MIT Media Lab graduate student Ben Bloomberg: “I have, by the way, not encountered Ben Bloomberg before, but I should like to stress that the work, given in this third in a three-day set of premieres in a performance that wonderfully communicated the tone of positively rhapsodic enthusiasm voiced in Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s introductory remarks, could not have made anything like so scintillating an impression without the clarity Mr Bloomberg’s audio technology brought to it.”
Read the full review: A Machover Premiere Celebrates the City of Brotherly Love
Opera of the Future 