Reviews

• Stookey's Out of the Everywhere is a 22-minute celebration of childbirth, written for his wife and two children, and it's a lush riot of orchestral color built on a solid structural foundation.
  
  Actually, the piece is less about birth itself – although that does figure into it prominently – than the period of gestation leading up to the climactic passage. It's constructed as a series of variations over a theme, dubbed "moon music," that recurs 10 times in the course of the pregnancy, and the piece unfolds in three movements, or trimesters, played without a break.
  
  Taking as his model the large passacaglia movements of Bach and later Brahms and Britten, Stookey overlays this theme with a variety of invitingly scored episodes, from vivacious dance music to plush instrumental chorales. The theme itself makes a first appearance bathed in shimmery moonlight a la Richard Strauss; later it pokes up tentatively amid the proceedings.
  
  The ending is foreordained: With a triumphant blaze of brass and timpani, the baby makes its way into the world. In the final measures -- sentimental but irresistible -- the newborn surveys the new surroundings of the nursery, embodied by a plinking mobile over the crib and the strains of "Au clair de la lune" from the flute.
  Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 17/05/2005