Reviews

Pianist Marilyn Nonken, a Feldman specialist, brought the delicate "Triadic Memories" to life with near-miraculous alchemy.

David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Enquirer
Click for full review

An invaluable component in this city's new- music firmament

Time Out New York (November 2010)

(CD review: Marilyn Nonken with Ensmble Elision, Ferneyhough: Terrain and Other Works [Kairos])
"Splendidly performed"
Named among Top 10 Contemporary Music recordings of 2010

The London Times 2010

A powerful performance by Marilyn Nonken and Sarah Rothenberg .... Ms. Nonken and Ms. Rothenberg (who studied Messiaen’s music in Paris with Ms. Loriod) demonstrate a deep understanding of this shimmering, colorful score .... The players forcefully convey the savage energy of “Amen of the Stars and the Ringed Planet,” [and] quiet tenderness ....morphs into passionate exuberance. The pealing bells of “Amen of Consummation,” the dazzyingly colorful finale, ring with sparkling clarity in these pianists’ capable hands. [full review here]

Vivien Schweitzer, New York Times, 7/12/2010

The piece receives an outstanding performance from new music specialists Marilyn Nonken ... and Sarah Rothenberg, whose playing garnered accolades from both Loriod and the composer. Their superb technique gives them the assurance to play with the unfettered abandon the composer demands, and their comfort with each other allows them to play with sensitivity and flexibility. The passion they bring to the final movement in particular is staggering in its intensity, dramatic pacing, and sheer volume; it can leave the listener exhausted and elated, which was surely Messiaen's intention.

Stephen Eddins, All Music Guide, 2010

The music, played here with the requisite exuberance and clarity by the duo of Marilyn Nonken and Sarah Rothenberg, infuses Messiaen's characteristic concerns with an overriding sense of excitement and even triumph - the harmonies are full of shimmery major chords, the rhythms are buoyant and intricate. This is not music for the faint of heart, but Nonken and Rothenberg give it an alluring, celebratory sheen.

Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle 11/7/2010

... a player with a big technique able to produce Lisztian and Messiaen-like swirls that begin to assume an acoustical mind of their own. ... Marilyn Nonken ... [made] the listener feel as though his cranium were an extension of the piano’s resonating chamber.

Mark Swed, LA Times 12/8/2009

A provocative pianist with a superb command of the modern repertoire

Sacramento Bee 11/1/2009

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.

Andrew Farach-Colton, Gramophone 10/2009

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!

Christian Carey, SEQUENZA 21
October 2009

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.

American Record Guide
July/August, 2009

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.

Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe
7-19-09

The musicians of Ensemble 21 play this music sizzlingly. Particularly striking in “Polarities” is Jean Kopperud’s fluid, feisty clarinet playing, which bounces between klezmerlike note bending and assertive multiphonics that evoke John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Taimur Sullivan, on soprano saxophone, makes “Tangled Loops” (1996) into a vivid character piece. And Marilyn Nonken’s sharply focused and often athletic pianism, Rolf Schulte’s lyrical violin playing, atmospheric percussion by Thomas Kolor and a rich cello line from Chrisopher Finckel, enliven the involved textures of “A Glimpse Retraced” (1999)

Allan Kozinn, The New York Times
11-6-07

The final work, David Rakowski's Piano Concerto, was also having its world premiere, with soloist Marilyn Nonken. It was the most conventional in form - in four separate movements - yet also the most fully satisfying work of the evening. ... Each of the four soloists was superb, and Nonken was outstanding. BMOP, under Gil Rose, gave the kind of vital, secure performances we have come almost to take for granted. May they remain glorious and subversive for years to come.

David Weininger, The Boston Globe
11-6-07

In an environment that has nurtured many fine pianists who are sympathetic to new music (Oppens, Kalish, Hamelin, etc.), Marilyn Nonken stands out among American pianists for her intense devotion (she plays new music exclusively) and the enormous scope of her technique.

Peter Burwasser, Fanfare
January/February 2006

Pianist Marilyn Nonken presented a thorny, brilliant and uncompromising program, as challenging as it was rewarding, at the Clarice Smith Center in February. The first part of the concert was devoted to recent works by the contemporary composers Pierre Boulez, Arthur Jarvinen and Chris Dench, with the entire second half given over to the mammoth Sonata No. 2 ("Concord") by Charles Ives. No, it wasn't exactly easy listening, yet the Ives piece, in particular, has never sounded so good. Nonken stressed the sonata's lyricism, continuity and organic structure. For once it held together as a coherent work of art instead of a scattershot glossary of yesterday's experimental techniques.

Tim Page, The Washington Post
12-25-05 (Best of 2005)

A lot of this music is so floridly difficult and exhausting that anyone who plays it had better be just as good.... Ms. Nonken's playing was the victory of a survivor who had met every mood and outburst head on and with style, outlasting every obstacle.

Bernard Holland, The New York Times
10-22-05

You can rest assured that in Marilyn Nonken we are hearing a musician of outstanding qualities. It is evident that she knows, strongly characterises and loves this music. She has performed it and many other 'difficult' contemporary works all over the world and is a pianist in whom we can trust. Her mastery of Murail's sonorities and her virtuosity are truly  remarkable and demand attention.

Gary Higginson, Musicweb
8-05

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.

Andy Hamilton, The Wire
8-05

Marilyn Nonken…is one of the finest new-music specialists around today. Her piano playing is incredibly sensitive, and she brings a tremendous understanding and sense of shape to the very difficult music. There are various 'complexity technicians' around who have made a career out of playing very hard modernist scores simply by getting through all the notes (which is certainly an impressive feat). Nonken, however, is very far from that world, being a true musician who has chosen to invest her vast musical insight into the works of the composers she most believes in. 

Carson Cooman,Music & Vision
8-13-05

["Tristan Murail: Complete Piano Music"] an important CD for all lovers of the piano; it gave me a thrill comparable to first hearing, decades ago, of the Kontarsky LPs of all Stockhausen's piano pieces. 

Peter Grahame Woolf, Musical Pointers
7-05

There’s such a temptation with Triadic Memories…to smooth out the prickly rhythms, and let the music float and turn ambient. Nonken resists. Her rhythms twist and turn with Feldman’s peculiar notation, and her tone color, though soft, is melodically urgent, not self-effacing. It's a dynamite performance captured on a spectacularly pristine recording [Mode 136].

Kyle Gann, ArtsJournal.com
6-22-05

Nonken lived up to her considerable press. There's nobody like her out there, from her attractive stage presence (think Bebe Neuwirth in Broadway's Chicago) to her lack of self-serving ostentation.

David Patrick Stearns, The Philadelphia Inquirer
3-9-05

If new music is at a crossroads, Marilyn Nonken stands at a prominent corner. The New York pianist's artistry represents a special direction, unafraid of the modern aesthetic, unwilling to follow the retrograde path of so many of her contemporaries. Which may sound like a recipe for dry, academic music, but that preconception is smashed by the power, passion and sheer athleticism of Nonken's playing. 

Peter Burwasser, Philadelphia Citypaper
3-3-05

Marilyn Nonken's Saturday evening recital at the Clarice Smith Center was the most courageous and uncompromising program of piano music I've heard in years.... Let's start with the Ives, for Nonken's performance came as a revelation.... [T]here is genuine majesty in the "Concord" Sonata, and nobody else, in my experience, has brought it out so convincingly as Nonken.

Tim Page, The Washington Post
2-21-05

Dench's most recent piano score, passing bells: night, recalls Debussy's preludes with its waves of impressionistic sounds and its dark, moody atmosphere. New York pianist Marilyn Nonken adroitly projected the music's various inky shades at its first public hearing. It would appear from the program notes that Nonken has had this difficult score for only a fortnight, which made the performance even more meritorious.

Joel Crotty, The Age (Melbourne)
1-24-05

 

Ms. Nonken -- or rather, Dr. Nonken -- regularly delivers some of the most probing performances of contemporary music that I've had the pleasure of hearing. If only all modern works could be presented by such intelligent and confident artists.

Bruce Hodges, Musicweb UK
12-04

Pianist Marilyn Nonken is widely regarded as one of the foremost musicians currently championing the contemporary repertoire. Playing Saturday evening at Vogel Hall in the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, she lived up to her reputation. Nonken approaches the repertoire with impeccable discipline, technique and musical integrity. She creates distinct moods and vivid flashes of emotion using the full palette of colors, dynamics and articulations possible on the instrument.

Elaine Schmidt, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
10-31-04

Marilyn Nonken, the pianist, furthered the impression of grace, playing [Finnissy's music] so smoothly that even when the music fragmented it remained essentially lyrical, and never, to use an adjective too often applied to contemporary music, "spiky." In "Kemp's Morris," she strapped bells to her hands (echoing those on the legs of a Morris dancer) and ended with gentle tinkling circlings of her hands above the keyboard, moving into the realm of choreography.

Anne Midgette, The New York Times
10-12-04

Marilyn Nonken, impressive in works by Oliver Knussen and Jason Eckardt, ended the program brilliantly with the Sonata III (1987) by the Italian modernist Salvatore Sciarrino, a work that had just as much cerebral integrity as Mr. Wuorinen's [third] sonata but more fantasy and elegance. Ms. Nonken's performance also earned her whoops and cheers. It was a very encouraging night for contemporary music.

Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
4-8-04

Making short work of this complexity, Nonken more than proved her mettle by playing expert tour guide [in Ives' "Concord" Sonata], and the results were scintillating. She was especially effective in the contrasts between crunchingly dense pages that abruptly disappear and in their wake are replaced by wispy soliloquies. As she raced around the keyboard, occasionally pausing for a hymn here and there, some might say this is Ives at his most maddeningly disorganized, but I find this piece exhilarating. It is also exhilarating watching a star pianist perform it, since it is horrendously difficult to play -- not only for "getting all the notes" but also in the stamina required.

Bruce Hodges, Musicweb UK
03-04

Pianist Nonken took part in the Cage circus, but her main duty was her luminous recital Sunday of Murail works.... Here, delicacy and urgency are juxtaposed with rare drama and hypnotic power.... Nonken's crystalline command of sonority and detail clarified the haunting elements in Murail's music. She is a supreme interpreter of new music who blends audacity with sensitivity.

Donald Rosenberg, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
11-18-03

[Morton Feldman's "Triadic Memories"] is a remarkable piece, especially when performed with the concentration and artistry shown here by the talented Marilyn Nonken.... It is a tribute to Nonken’s stunning expertise that she maintained the crystalline, meditative mood for the entire span.

Bruce Hodges, Musicweb UK
11-03

Not just in length but also in beauteous accessibility, [Morton Feldman's] "Triadic Memories" is a less daunting piece than the big quartet. That doesn't mean it's less important; beauty can  be its own reward. Ms. Nonken played it with a relaxed, almost rubber-wristed calm, caressing the keys without losing rhythmic definition. A lovely performance of a lovely piece.

John Rockwell, The New York Times
10-29-03

Nonken is fearless: [Tristan Murail's complete music for piano] had more notes than one cares to think about, and she blazed through all of them with ease and a bit of sang-froid. Visually, she exudes expert detachment, but she clearly understands the music deeply.

Jason Royal, Andante.com
03-03

Sensitive, technical and cutting-edge all describe pianist Marilyn Nonken's musical style.

The San Francisco Examiner
9-27-02

Ms. Nonken, a noted advocate of 20th-century music, has been on tour with two programs of formidably complex atonal and 12-tone music: the complete solo piano works of Arnold Schoenberg and the complete solo piano works of Pierre Boulez.... Hearing her perform these works in concert is inspiring.... Mr. Boulez's music must at least seem authentic, gnarly and awesome. From the first work, "12 Notations" (1945), Ms. Nonken captured those qualities, as well as the music's delicacy and refinement.... Achieving continuity is a challenge in the Sonata No. 1 (1946) and the daunting 30-minute Sonata No. 2 (1947-48). Both works evolve in fits and starts in which splattering volleys of pitches and steely chords are followed by flickering, ethereal figurations. Ms. Nonken brought impressive dramatic cogency to these works, as well as to the Sonata No. 3 (1955-57), which can seem like a series of disconnected, meterless gestures.... When she concluded the program with the short "Incises" (1994), a sort of Boulezian answer to the Prokofiev Toccata, it was as if we were hearing some favorite old thing.

Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
3-20-02

Nonken came into her own through the exercise of her own extraordinary talents and applying the principles of historically-informed performance -- not for her fin-de-siècle angst; sumptuous pedaling; and tempos far slower that the composer's metronome marks. Instead her work was transparent, volatile, chameleon-colored and often playful; Schoenberg smiled. The Gigue from Op. 25 (Schoenberg pouring new wine into old bottles) went like lightning, and the audience burst into applause. Nonken fascinated by bringing romantic colorations to a thoroughly contemporary way of hearing this music. 

Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
11-14-01

Ms. Nonken's playing was impressive for its fleetness, gestural sweep and imagination.... The audience listened raptly and gave the stalwart pianist an ardent ovation.... It was a heartening week for [Schoenberg], who clung all his life to the belief that someday his music would be celebrated exactly this way. 

Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
11-14-01

Marilyn Nonken tackled the composer's complete solo piano works in an elegant program at Miller Theater on Thursday night. Beginning with music from 1894, and ending with two works from 1928 and 1931, Nonken played with wonderful clarity and a probing intensity of focus. Nonken's playing not only illuminated these works individually, but also traced the fascinating arc of the composer's development - from his early Romantic musings with flashes of originality, to a mature and startling expressionistic language that would change classical music forever.

Jeremy Eichler, Newsday
11-6-01

In "Klavierstück IX" I entered into something like an altered state. After 144 repetitions of a stubborn chord, two timid little tones emerged, and for a heartbeat, Marilyn Nonken let the music hang suspended, while I wondered if those little notes were some kind of footnote to the opening, or just a momentary pause for breath before the music moved ahead.

Greg Sandow, The Wall Street Journal
3-19-01

Marilyn Nonken gave a luminous account of [Klavierstück IX], showing how the extremes of regularity and irregularity dovetail. The chord repetitions were tense and lifted as much as they thudded; the surreptitious detail of changes in balance and resonance came through, partly thanks to the use of moderate amplification, as Mr. Stockhausen prefers. Ms. Nonken also captured the marvel of the moment when monotony gives way to the first melody, and maintained a sense of purpose through all the beautiful, wavering music that results, right up to an extraordinarily quiet but intense close that clinched the whole piece.

Paul Griffiths, The New York Times
  2-28-01

 

Most admirable of Nonken's many fine qualities were her passion and commitment. She gave all of this music, which is difficult in every way that music can be difficult, every possible advantage. Her strong technique made even the knottiest rhythms and chords clear. 

Tom Strini, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
1-29-01

The program began with [Barraque's] Sonata for piano, played by Marilyn Nonken in a performance that was unusually but persuasively light in texture and skipping in motion. Perhaps too much has been made of what is heavy and oppressed in the work's three-quarter-hour progress. For Ms. Nonken, it is also fantastical, and it's just as intense that way, with a sharp glint in its staccato chords, a clear sense of the churning harmony in the most strictly determined sections and a nice scaling of tempos, so that one section bounces out of another. The silences of the latter part were duly ominous, but the music maintained the possibility of new adventure. The last note, instead of being the final nail in the coffin, was a bright point of light and promise.

Paul Griffiths, The New York Times
11-22-00

Marilyn Nonken performed one of this or any year's best and most demanding recitals of 20th-century piano music.... Nonken's performances stressed lyricism, abounded in color and nuance, made convincing contextual and rhythmic sense of the sudden storms of sound and the prolonged buffers of silence, and brought clarity and direction. 

Michael Manning, The Boston Globe
10-31-00

You could tolerate not hearing Ives's "Concord" Sonata too often -- oddly few pianists offer it -- if every performance were as fresh, as inviting, as cogent and as delectable in sound and gesture as Marilyn Nonken's...Ms. Nonken 4is a pianist from music's leading edge.... Her dominant qualities would be advantages in any music: lightness in attack, clarity of texture, singing lines (and singing chords), variety of nuance, certainty in defining climaxes and in moving toward or away from them, a sense that the end of a movement must matter, as witness her deft conclusion to a brilliant account, at once fantastical and purposeful.... a beautiful performance.... "Kemp's Morris" found Ms. Nonken always precise and poetic at the keyboard.

Paul Griffiths, The New York Times
10-17-00

The solo performance was by Marilyn Nonken, who, as always, played exceptionally. Without a doubt, she is one of the finest pianists interpreting new music today.

Joseph Pehrson, The New Music Connoisseur 4-00

The superb new music specialist.

Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe, "Best of 1999"
12-26-99

Ms. Nonken...played music that demanded the agile, speedy fingerwork that has become her calling card.... [Babbitt's compositions] are witty, nuanced works that make extreme technical demands. Ms. Nonken was not only equal to them, but more crucially, she clarified the conversational flow within these abstract works. In Mr. Babbitt's music, that single element makes the difference between an involving performance and a distantly abstract one.

Allan Kozinn, The New York Times
10-20-99

"Dedicated exclusively," it says in Marilyn Nonken's artist's bio, "to music of this century." Does this have a reader's eyes glazing over already? If so, please un-glaze them at once! No two ways about it, what we have here is a remarkable young pianist by any standards, and those other centuries' loss is very much our gain.... In addition to being the possessor of a first-class technique, not so unusual a thing these days, Nonken summons up a passionate identification with just the sort of music that would most seem to resist any such identification.... When she returns -- soon, please -- may there be a crush to hear her. She's that kind of pianist.

Richard Buell, The Boston Globe
10-19-99

One of New York's most devoted champions of new music.

Jeremy Eichler, New York Today
10-5-99

Nonken has established a reputation in New York, Boston, and [now] Milwaukee as an expert perfomer of some of the most advanced and complex music ever created for her instrument.

Leon Kohen, Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
8-15-98

What she prefers is new and fast, and she does it well. She has agility, stamina and thoughtfulness....Ms. Nonken was thoroughly absorbing....The piano changes in front of your ears...an excellent performer.

Paul Griffiths, The New York Times
7-22-98

This pianist enthusiastically explores modern and other contemporary areas where a lot of pianists fear to hang out, and she packs enough artistry and technique for the journey.

Leighton Kerner, The Village Voice
7-21-98

Nonken is certainly no stranger to the new-music scene. She's a top-notch performer who brings to her performances a crackerjack technique and sensitive interpretations.

Ira Rosenblum, New York Today
7-21-98

Intent, she summoned the great instrument as though she were a courtesan bringing a hand job to its thunderous conclusion.... Ms. Nonken, you do our gender and your artform proud.

Shelley Masar, The Octopus (Urbana, IL)
10-24-97

Not only dedicated and skilled, but also talented, fearless, and sensitive. Everything was bracingly clear in the direction of the phrase and the piece as a whole...exquisitely, sensually beautiful, in a thoroughly modern sort of way.

Tom Strini, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 
2-10-97

The thorny scores of Schoenberg, Davidovsky, and Carter, forbidding and opaque to most pianists, are Nonken's playground.

Tom Strini, The Milwaukee Journal
5-8-94

These pieces are difficult for both the body and the intellect, but her technique is in place and her feeling for these pieces is so heartfelt, so sincere, that one is constantly engaged. In an odd way, her role may have been that of a preservationist, a determined protector of important music that history embraces in the abstract and...one day may take to heart.

Bernard Holland, The New York Times 
4-30-94

Marilyn Nonken played the piano with remarkable clarity...[and] gave an assured, crystalline account...a pointillistic abstract essay full of extremes in range, dynamics, and timbre.

Allan Kozinn, The New York Times
4-14-94

The performer of the evening was the young pianist Marilyn Nonken, who invested every note...with thought and grace.

Tom Strini, The Milwaukee Journal
4-17-91

Ms. Nonken's playing of complex counterpoint was clear as a bell, and was even more striking in the slow, lyrical sections, demonstrating that the music has tunes as well as brains. Her playing also conveyed an innocence and a freshness.

City Newspaper (Rochester, NY)
2-22-91