Marilyn Nonken plays throughout with peerless authority and resplendent technique, her exceptional range of touch and dynamics marvellously caught in this fine recording.

The playing of 34 year old pianist Marilyn Nonken is luminous, showing delicacy, drama, and passion and seeming to capture every nuance of this beautiful music.... an ideal introduction to the work of one of the finest contemporary composers.

This is, without a doubt, the most beautiful sounding TRIADIC MEMORIES I've heard.

Nonken's TRIADIC MEMORIES could make the piace more open to the uninitiated...The clarity of her textures and her ease of movement through the labyrinthine structure has much to recommend it. The recorded sound is quite outstanding, too, and the disc is also available on a DVD including Nonken's 20-minute discussion of the piece.

On Matrix, Louis Karchin and the listener are blessed with precise, vibrant performances by fully committed, excellent players dedicated to new music.

American composer Charles Wuorinen (b.1938) has spent much of his career exploring a post-tonal style combining carefully balanced formal designs with vibrant and virtuosic musical surfaces. He's been blessed with an array of ardent interpreters who relish the challenges posed by his works. Several of Wuorinen's best advocates appear on ADAPTING TO THE TIMES, the latest CD in Albany Records's Charles Wuorinen Series. A wideranging survey of chamber pieces dating from 1961-1995, ADAPTING the recording is an engaging collection of contemporary concert fare....."Adapting to the Times" features long-time Wuorinen ally cellist Fred Sherry and superlative new music pianist Marilyn Nonken in an exciting, tightly coordinated performance."

...As with so many "difficult" composers, these are often the kinds of pieces that make for the best listening--and the recorded format allows you to listen over and over again, making them all the more rewarding. Thanks to Wuorinen's connections and his credibility as a pianist, the performers here are of the highest quality--many of them were members of Wuorinen's Group for Contemporary music, and all of them are worthy successors to that manyle. They give his music the careful, passionate performances that it deserves.

There are marvellous ideas in David Rakowski's music. At the very end of the first movement of his Piano Concerto (2006), for instance, the soloist suddenly switches to toy piano to play a flourish that's at once otherworldly and mischievous.Similarly the jazzy syncopations and riffs in the movement that follows convey simultaneous feelings of playful spontaneity and lurking menace .... Pianist Marilyn Nonken, who's had a long association with Rakowski's music, plays the tricky solo part of the Concerto with great flair and finesse.

Nonken has been one of several tireless champions of Rakowski’s solo piano works. It seems particularly fitting that he has fashioned a concerto for Nonken .... resulting in a work of ambitious scope and a near-frenetic events structure. Easily one of Rakowski’s finest pieces to date, it features a host of playing techniques – thereby allowing Nonken to exercise both her conventional chops and explore some avant paths along the way. ... While the piano writing is tailor-made to Nonken’s abundant capabilities, she’s also given a chance to exercise a bit of whimsy in several asides for toy piano. Nonken records Rakowski’s cadenza for the CD, but it’s worth mentioning that the composer let her create her own for the premiere – such is the trust and close working relationship of creator and interpreter here.The other interpreters on the scene, Gil Rose and the BMOP, are sterling in their preparation and superlatively musical. The disc is one of the orchestra’s best thus far, and the weightiest and most satisfying in Rakowski’s discography to date. Serious fun indeed!

BMOP/sound ... has released a steady stream of impeccably produced, beautifully packaged discs with exacting and engaged performances of 20th- and 21st-century music. Several elegantly probing pieces by Brandeis-based composer David Rakowski were recently featured on a BMOP Sound disc called “Winged Contraption,’’ including his Piano Concerto in a strong performance by Marilyn Nonken.

The keyboard writing [in David Rakowski's Piano Concerto]--much of it derived from the composer's piano etudes--is virtuosic and intricate, [and] Marilyn Nonken ... plays the socks off the solo part ... a brilliant creation that offers a multitude of inventive details, lots of drama and excitement, and a satisfying sense of large-scale formal logic.