Reviews

• Ms. Fleming champions living American composers not from some sense of obligation but because their music excites her. [Having commissioned] Aaron Jay Kernis, the composer played for her in his new song cycle, VALENTINES, based on four sardonic and bracingly feminist poems by Carol Ann Duffy.
  
  Kernis's music here is like some spiky American version of Alban Berg expressionism. At times it has a ferocious intensity, and the harmonic language is thickly chromatic and wildly wayward. So when the music turns reflective - clearer, simpler, more diatonic - the effect is doubly powerful.
  Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times