Reviews

• Leon Kirchner's Of Things Exactly As They Are is a work of formidable complexity that makes an unforgettable immediate impact. Not everything about it can be known, or even imagined, from a first performance, even a first performance as skillful and dedicated as the one offered last night by Seiji Ozawa, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. But it was abundantly apparent that this is a work of beauty and of bounty, and the career-crowning achievement that everyone was hoping for. The appearance of the composer on-stage at the end brought cheers from the audience.
  The music, written at the end of our century, looks back to the close of the previous one. It is dense, striving, energetic, responsive to the world around us as evoked in the poems, and powerfully, directly, unnervingly emotional. Paradoxically it is at once highly condensed and at the same time broadly expansive; richly chromatic yet also sometimes poignantly transparent; entirely down to earth in its grasp of human and natural realities, yet transcendental in impulse and aspiration.
  Richard Dyer, Boston Globe, 27/09/1997