Reviews

• Stookey's "Mahlerwerk," which opened the program, is one of those high-concept undertakings that quickly transcend the simplicity of their underlying premise. The piece is a 15-minute mosaic assembled out of notes, chords and other fragments - hundreds of them, by the composer's count - taken intact from Mahler's symphonies. Not a moment in the piece doesn't have its roots in Mahler.
  
  What's striking about the results, at least at first, is how little they sound like Mahler. Stookey's work is not a stylistic pastiche, but an original score made out of found objects, something like a Chuck Close portrait or one of those digital images built from a grid of other, unrelated images.
  
  One does hear familiar riffs or harmonies flit past now and then, but the piece's shape and overall rhetoric have almost nothing to with their source. Rather, Stookey uses his material to create a chugging, dancelike tribute not only to Mahler but also to the synth-pop of the 1980s - particularly the influential German band Kraftwerk, to which the piece's title pays homage.
  Joshua Kosman, SF Gate, 20/05/2013
• “Mahlerwerk” came to register rather like a wild theme park ride with a thoroughly exhilarating conclusion.
  Stephen Smoliar, Examiner, 19/05/2013
• Whoever was afraid of intellectually difficult music was quickly proven wrong. Stookey’s crazy puzzle with over a hundred Mahler fragments turned out to be a highly intelligent and musically attractive, even vibrant homage to Gustav Mahler. The performance in Hamburg Arena was most successful in making classical music attractive to future fans.
  Michael Stitz, Schleswig-Holstein Newspaper , 23/05/2011