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"Choosing this year's outstanding premieres of New Zealand Music has proved particularly difficult in 1998... Dorothy Ker's Darkness and Light, with its assured control of tension, must be a strong contender"
"In Darkness and Light... a response to Colin McCahon's Northland Panels... Ker uses broad swathes of mingled colour, drawing attention to sound, ahead of such mundane things as notes. There are looming masses of string sound, and the percussion section is prominent in defining the identities of the finely blended timbres. The end of the piece appeared to leave the orchestral world altogether, suggesting instead the sounds of wind and water; a marvelous experience..."
Music in New Zealand Summer 1998/1999
"The highlight for many was Dorothy Ker's [...and...] ...Ker employed the players like a single instrument...it was delicious listening. Set wide across the stage expansive gestures moved through the ensemble with an almost spatial effect, manipulating the dry acoustic of the Purcell Room."
The New Zealand Herald, October 2002
"Dorothy Ker's [...and...11] proved a fascinating and rewarding study of contemporary timbres"
Musical Opinion, Jan-Feb 2003
"...we were plunged into a sound-world of introspective, intensely psychological responses, through Dorothy Ker's "The Third Dream". The composer drew from some material from a stage work "Dreaming Iphianassa" in constructing this piece, one of a series reflecting Ker's interest in the nature of dreams and memory, and the musical ideas arising from the same. This was music which awakened rather than began, made from sounds whose substance seemed to spontaneously engender themselves, as various delicacies of detail danced upon amorphous slabs of sound-mass. I enjoyed the growing of intensities through tone, pitch and rhythm, as sound-tendrils groped for illumination through densities bent upon keeping their secrets for as long as they could. The music often resembled a kind of game played by natural impulses, setting opposing tensions and stresses against one another, and sometimes touching upon raw nerves, manifested in baleful brass outbursts and anxiety-fraught string agitations.
"The veritable wealth of orchestral detail employed by the composer required in places multi-tasked responses from the players (the wind section augmenting their activities with percussion instruments, for example), and a good deal of patient mosaic-work all round. The whole rehearsal process seemed to put the listener in touch with a kind of ambient universal subconscious, whose primordial inclinations of colour and texture resonated throughout different kinds of life-forces, permeating the human spirit in its deepest recesses. Throughout, conductor Hamish McKeich encouraged his players with a mixture of specific direction and osmotic repetition, unerringly building the structure phrase by phrase, episode by episode. His grasp of the work's overall shape was evident throughout the work's presentation performance at the day's end, so that the volatile and explosive encounters between incident and stasis that grew from the music's deeply-dreamt origins reached their fruition and nemesis in the "do-I-wake-or-sleep?" coda, where wraith-like strings dissolved into the air over a dull, pizzicati tread. Challenging music, obviously, but undoubtedly a piece to be reckoned with."
Peter Mechen, February 2003
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