"Gloria Cheng's new release of works by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Steven Stucky and Witold Lutoslawski is consistently exhilarating. It's not just that Ms. Cheng plays these daunting pieces with such commanding technique, color and imagination. She has brought together works that fascinatingly complement one another."
Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
"Her illuminating concerts have made her a local treasure in California, both to younger composers and younger listeners. She plays with clarity and intelligence, exuding such assurance that it seems she and the composer have plotted each note together...and if reports from California are to be believed, she can talk about the music as zealously as she plays it."
Ted Shen, Chicago Reader
"Cheng is a winner (no wonder one of her greatest fans is Boulez)."
Jeremy Siepmann, BBC Music Magazine
"Gloria Cheng's performance [of Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies] at her recent Piano Spheres concert at Zipper hall reminded me of the music's wonders. ...Time has not reduced the terrors in the work, and the Cheng performance - broadly expressive, splendidly responsive to the work's title - was a matter of bravery beyond the call."
Alan Rich, Los Angeles Weekly
"Cheng produces a glamorous, silvery tone from the piano, and in the several glittery birdcall cadenzas she conveyed just how gorgeously sensual Messiaen's piano writing is, despite its tremendous complexities."
Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
"[Re: Esa-Pekka Salonen's Dichotomie] it's virtuoso requirements were brilliantly met by Gloria Cheng, who struck flashes of lightning from the keyboard and skated across breathtaking glissandos."
Shirley Fleming, MusicalAmerica.com
"Gloria Cheng's Piano Dance (Telarc) might easily have been just another glib concept album - 23 pieces explicitly based on dances - had she not gone to the effort of assembling a compelling recital of twentieth-century pieces and then playing them as if her life depended on it."
James M. Keller, The New Yorker
"Los Angeles pianist Gloria Cheng is one of the heroes of the new-music world, an energetic and imaginative artist whose tastes range widely across the contemporary landscape."
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
"In Cheng's recital, two short [Thomas] Adès piano pieces, Darknesse Visible and Still Sorrowing, reinforced the impression of a composer with outsize but French-flavored sonic imagination. The first is a 17th-century John Dowland song as psychedelic piano spray, the second is darker and percussive, the piano "prepared" with tape applied to the middle strings. Both works were made more relevant by Cheng's illuminating programming of modern French and British piano music. The French - examples by Messiaen, Boulez and the spectral composer Tristan Murail - all featured cool but brilliant colored sonorities produced by various kinds of fluttery patterns. The number of notes Cheng played in one afternoon was astronomical and her own cool precision in the face of it was riveting."
Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
