Press
Recent coverage:
CBS’s WLKY: Louisville Orchestra Debuts Performance at Shelby Park
ABC’s WHAS Great Day Live: Louisville Broadcast Interview
The New York Times: Contemporary Music Champions Celebrate With the Hits
The Boston Musical Intelligencer: RCS Returns With Departure
NPR’s Morning Edition: When Pandemics Arise, Composers Carry On
To the Best of Our Knowledge: Putting the Mood of Covid-19 to Music
Houston Public Media’s Classical Classroom: All Together Now with Lisa Bielawa
ABC’s The Music Show (Australia): Composer Under Covid, and Moonlighting with Beethoven
BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show (England): Woven Fingerprints and Unfurling
Acclaim:
“The collected lines (“I want to sit across from you,” “I don’t want to meet you for happy hour online”) are then layered and formed by Bielawa into spellbinding, sparsely accompanied socially distanced choral pieces that play with absence and presence, isolation and community, fear and solace — and sound an awful lot like the voices in your head.” – The Washington Post on Broadcast from Home
“a reflection of Bielawa’s taste for both modernism as well as conventional sonic beauty...there is frequently a sumptuous element of orchestration on offer.” – The New York Times
“Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock.” – Gramophone
“ruminative, pointillistic, and harmonically slightly tart.” – The New York Times
“[Bielawa’s] music boasts a distinctive blend of Romantic effusion and steely, almost austere contemporaneity…. a fluid and arresting creation that is at once dramatic and probing.” – San Francisco Chronicle
“All the boundaries we take for granted in musical life - including those marking the beginning and end of a performance, or separating performers from an audience - are casually obliterated in Crissy Broadcast, composer Lisa Bielawa's magical and heartbreakingly beautiful exercise in public art. What's left is a heightened aesthetic sense of the world around us.” – San Francisco Chronicle
“a dynamic and innovative composer” – The Boston Globe
“the formal sophistication and lyrical richness of Bielawa’s music go deep” – The New Yorker
“Bielawa walked into the hall as a professional, but she may well have walked out a star: the piece caused that kind of excitement.” – The New Yorker
“prodigious gift for mingling persuasive melodicism with organic experimentation” – Time Out New York
“Bielawa’s music is thoughtful and approachable. She’s a voice in what you might call the new accessible avant-garde.” – Gramophone Magazine
“[Lay of the Love is an] absorbing and atmospheric disc.” – The New York Times
“Bielawa’s magnificent Kafka Songs could hardly be sparer in their means, or more memorably potent in their effect… [it] is one of the most brilliant and unforgettable new scores I’ve heard in years.” – San Francisco Chronicle
"Lisa Bielawa’s My Outstretched Hand wove variegated, at times voluptuous choral textures around the 1901 memoirs of Mary MacLane, the radical freethinker of Butte, Montana.” – The New Yorker
“Sanctuary has something to say about the human condition and the times we live in” – Orlando Sentinel
“The blend of soprano and violin weaving around each other in Lisa Bielawa’s Sanctuary Songs is equally compelling, straying into political territory with its fixation on a line from an Elinor Wylie poem, ‘Make my marvelous wall so thick’.” – The Strad