What the critics say…(see also “News” for some of the very latest)

“New York-based Australian-born pianist Lisa Moore delivered a brilliantly lyrical performance at The Neilson in “Show Your Heart”, which she indeed did with a diverse repertoire.” The Sydney Morning Herald, Helen Pitt, Sydney Festival, March 2023, full article here.

August 4th 2022 “Critic’s Notebook” of  The New York Times  reviews Moore’s ‘no place to go but around’ album here:

 “Rzewski For Lovers? Pianist Mines a Prickly Modernist’s Gentler Side”

Seth Colter Walls writes: “The lushness of some of its chords, though, is what strikes me most forcefully on repeat listens. And that’s thanks in part to Moore’s overall approach to Rzewski, which often allows for a greater range of emotion than other interpreters permit, including the composer…

While the composer’s version of “No Place to Go” offered some stark interpolations of the Italian labor movement song “Bandiera Rossa” — another political reference — Moore’s rendition truly lets that borrowed tune spill forth, toward the end of the 12th minute…

That inviting quality of Moore’s album extends to her latest performance of “Coming Together,” one of Rzewski’s most well-known contributions to the modern repertoire. Its text comes from a letter by the Attica prison uprising leader Sam Melville. But unlike some ceaselessly galvanic performances of this Minimalist-tinged composition, Moore’s solo voice-and-piano approach takes dramatic notice of references to lovers’ “emotions in times of crisis” that are present in the literary source material…

Just as striking is her take on the rarely heard “To His Coy Mistress,” a setting of Andrew Marvell’s poem from the 17th century. Moore’s playing is meticulous when it comes to the compact three-act structure of the music (and its text); she hits the gas with a controlled force, just before singing the line “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Later on, the word “embrace” triggers a newly reflective mode.”

FULL ARTICLE IN ‘ARTICLES’ http://lisamoore.org/press/articles/


The Australian: 5 Star ***** Rzewski album review by Vincent Plush
“Moore reveals the gamut of her artistry, from the Bjork-like delivery of Andrew Marvell poetry to the thunderous battering of her hapless Steinway. Here, Moore’s music is never less than dazzling and breathtaking, offering a take-no-prisoners manifesto that is urgent, vital life-affirming.” 5 Stars!
Aug 20, 2022
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August 2021: for Moore’s solo concert at LOUD weekend MassMoca (produced by Bang on a Can)

New York Times review  LINK

“With over 20 hours’ worth of performances, you could see one familiar look after another — all of them hallmarks of the fabled, free Bang on a Can Marathons in New York City. But here, in a two-day, paid-ticket environment, there was more time for each musician’s set to take on an individual character. And even though a few artists copped to first-day-back jitters, most appearances unfurled with crisp, defiant polish — as if they’d spent no time away from audiences.

That was particularly true of pianist Lisa Moore’s show on Friday, which featured pieces by Philip Glass, Don Byron, Martin Bresnick — and a world premiere from Frederic Rzewski, who died in June. The set was confirmation of the interpretive insights she has brought works by these composers on her recordings. And the Rzewski premiere — “Amoramaro,” subtitled “Love Has No Laws” — was bittersweet: an alternately seductive and prickly reminder of all the music of his that can no longer be written.

“Amoramaro,” commissioned for Moore by her husband, is nonetheless something to treasure (and, surely, record). Its occasionally lush chords — half-remembered and half-transformed from the American Songbook — commingle with austere, flinty runs that make trapeze-swing connections between distant registers. And its climactic, banging clusters could have been inspired by Rzewski’s experience playing Stockhausen’s “Klavierstücke.” That it all held together, over 15 minutes, was evidence of both Rzewski’s peculiar and personal palette, and of Moore’s keen feel for it.” (Seth Colter Walls, New York Times)


May 2019: Sydney Symphony Orchestra International Piano Series “In the Mists”
Sydney Morning Herald writes:
Lisa Moore: Revolutionary works old and new
By Peter McCallum
Lisa Moore in Recital
Presented by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
City Recital Hall. April 29.
★★★★
“Lisa Moore’s recital framed a selection of old-world European works by Janacek, Beethoven and Schumann with newer works from America that each, in their different ways, have redefined how we hear and think about the piano and about music.
Lisa Moore presented a program of revolutionary works.
At the start came Philip Glass’s Etude No. 2, whose repetitive undulating textures are, on the surface, ideally matched to the kind of tradition that many 19th century virtuosi indulged in to test the instrument and acoustic of the hall before moving to the main fare.
Glass, however, has subtly transformed such textures through his ear for chords that resist any sense of forward direction towards a goal, each existing like lonely vessels of the human feeling in an empty landscape.
Moore played this piece with warmth, avoiding the over-mechanical approach minimalist works sometimes engender. She ended with Frederic Rzewski’s striking Piano Piece No. 4, which pulsated with the kind of energy that will not be quietened. It begins quietly with insistent repetitions at the top of the keyboard that gradually grow in volume and move across the range to the lowest register, like a distant object moving inevitably to the foreground. The idea is revisited and reversed several times in the piece, at one point allowing a more melodic idea to be superimposed, before ending where it began.
Janacek’s four-movement work In the Mists mixes dreamy contemplative music with moments of agitation and fretful distemper-like irrational thoughts that threaten repose.
In Moore’s hands, the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E flat, Opus 31, No. 3 also had its disrupted moments, emphasising quirky change over continuity. The second movement was quick, driven by stubborn impetuousness and the third movement, a Menuetto hurried along a sense of staidness through flexible rhythm before a galloping finale.
After a restrained reading of Schumann’s suite of nine short pieces, Forest Scenes, Opus 82, Moore played Martin Bresnick’s Ishi’s Song, which began with a short sung fragment that is then subject to rumination through minimalist repetitions.”

August 2018: “From Me To You”  in Extended Play @ City Recital Hall  Murray Black writes: “Lisa Moore’s impressive five-part set – the highlight was her compelling performance of Frederic Rzewski’s De Profundis in which Moore sobbed, sighed and spoke from Oscar Wilde’s text while playing the difficult piano part” (The Australian Aug 28, 2018)

March 2017: The Knoxville Mercury raved about Lisa at her opening concert in the Big Ears Festival ’17: “Lisa Moore’s exquisite solo piano performance at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral was a new dimension for Big Ears…the setting, in the sanctuary of the 125-year-old downtown church, lent a sacred mood to the hour-long concert. Big Ears often feels loosely spiritual, but hearing Mad Rush, Metamorphosis, Etude No. 2, and excerpts from Glassworks and Satyagraha—music that’s both intense and meditative, and all of it played with grace and quiet intelligence—in that space was unlike any previous Big Ears experiences I’ve had. The room was full of people, many of them with their eyes closed and heads bowed. In some ways it resembled a traditional piano recital; it also felt ceremonial and beatific.”

Lisa Moore’s CD The Stone People made the New York Times best classical music recordings list 2016 – one of 20 cds worldwide and the Naxos Critics Choice Feb’17 list. Quote: “‘THE STONE PEOPLE’ Lisa Moore, piano and voice (Cantaloupe Music). The occasion for this disc is an assemblage of  John Luther Adams’s three works so far for solo acoustic piano, including the sweeping “Among Red Mountains.” Playing through these stark landscapes with tenderness, Ms. Moore has sensitively set Mr. Adams’s trio alongside similarly atmospheric, somber, often wintry pieces Martin Bresnick, Julia Wolfe, Missy Mazzoli and Kate Moore.” (Zachary Woolfe)

 The Stone People CD track “Ishi’s Song” (by Martin Bresnick) made the 2016 top staff pick at New Music USA quote: Lisa’s playing (and singing) here is, as always, supremely musical and controlled and full of intent, and the piece, like all of Martin’s music, is profound, surprising, and rewarding to delve into. The Ishi of the title was the last of his people–the Yahi Indians–and the piece is based on transcription of a traditional song he recorded after being taken in by anthropologists at the University of California, Berkeley (his story is definitely worth reading). I’ve heard Lisa play (and Martin introduce) Ishi’s Song live a number of times now, and each performance feels like a brief glimpse into a lost world. The original melody is sung and then braided into shimmering, shifting textures, creating a mirage-like sensation, like being on the edge of seeing or grasping something that ultimately remains elusive. (Eileen Mack, Software Engineer)

the-stone-people-jacket-cover

The Stone People CD rave: “If you’re going to make a grand piano thunder and clang, you have to be able to do it with the elegance and fervor that pianist Lisa Moore brings to the task. About half of her formidable new release is devoted to music that rolls out in big, granitic masses, including John Luther Adams’ “Tukiliit,” which gives the disc its subtitle, and Julia Wolfe’s pitiless “Compassion.” Moore renders all of it with surprising tenderness and force. But even more striking (at least to this taste) are the contrasting stretches of gentle lyricism. The overlapping, sun-dappled textures of Martin Bresnick’s “Ishi’s Song” flirt continuously with sentimentality without ever lapsing into it, and Kate Moore’s “Sliabh Beagh” — a tribute to her Irish Australian forebears that is at once an invented folk ballad and an extensive piano commentary on that material — ties itself into wonderful self-referential knots. But the most unforgettable glimpse of beauty here comes from composer Missy Mazzoli, whose “Orizzonte” is a still-voiced meditation on eternity, with a subdued yet haunting layer of electronic sounds overlaying the piano writing.” —

Joshua Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle, April 3, 2016

An Earful blog writes:

Lisa Moore – The Stone People Here is someone who will delve without fear into the furthest reaches of piano music (seek out her Frederick Rzewski interpretations) and come up smiling. Her relentless curiosity and absolute commitment have served her well in assembling this album, which contains John Luther Adams’ complete music for the instrument. Two of his pieces are quite demanding, but not in the way you might think, as there are no furious runs here. It’s more about belief. And Moore believes. There’s also Kate Moore’s shamanistic Sleabh Bleagh and a memorable vignette, Orizzonte, by Missy Mazzoli, which is well worth the journey. Intriguing works by Julia Wolfe and Martin Bresnick complete a very substantial program. Maybe not for everyone, or for every mood, but you’ll never hear these pieces played better. (Jeremy Shatan, 17 July ’16)

“On her most recent album, “The Stone People,” the pianist Lisa Moore sings and plays Martin Bresnick’s hypnotic “Ishi’s Song,” a setting of a chant by the last member of the Yahi, who died in 1916.”

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times,
April 3, 2016

“Lisa Moore extraordinary in Fresh Sound series kickoff. Avant-garde pianist unleashes musical sensitivity and theatrical intelligence Thursday at Bread and Salt in Barrio Logan”
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Feb 5 2016

“The young crowd listened in total, loud silence. Good thing, too, as Lisa Moore’s lucid, committed pianism made the best of four works, each dealing with an aspect of landscape or nature”
(for Moving Mountains program)

The New York Times
June 9 2015

“Still, Ms. Moore offered a beautiful performance of Mr. Bresnick’s piece, with the meditative lucidity that is the hallmark of her playing. Perhaps coincidentally, the work illuminates seemly irreconcilable opposites, with alternating major and minor versions of the same chord. Repetitive fragments build up tension until the music abruptly gives way to conciliation. It’s the major mode that wins in the end, but quietly, without triumph”

The New York Times
May 2015

“Lisa Moore‘s concert last Sunday afternoon at The Center for New Music drew a standing room only crowd, and those in the audience were treated to an exceptionally well-conceived and performed program of music by living composers…. a large part of her repertoire are pieces for written for piano and voice, which are altogether different from lieder or art songs as the pianist and vocalist are the same. It’s a tricky feat, and one I’ve never seen performed live by a classical pianist, at least like this….De Profundis is a twenty-five minute excursion through the anguish and brilliance of Oscar Wilde’s famous 1895 letter written during his imprisonment for homosexuality. Rzewski’s music captures something fundamental in Wilde’s words, and Moore did both proud, turning in an exhilarating performance, full of fleeting moments instead of approaching it like an epic. When it was over it felt like only a few minutes had passed, and the audience took a moment to let it sink in before giving Moore a sustained, hearty ovation….She followed with Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” as an encore without leaving the stage. It was a suitable, gracious way to end one of the finest programs I’ve attended this year.”

John Marcher
A Beast in a Jungle
July 2014

“On Wednesday Lisa Moore played a beautiful, impassioned set. Martin Bresnick’s rowdy, sensual “Willie’s Way” (2006) asked the pianist to slap herself in the face, snap her fingers and beat her lap while playing a dazzling bluesy fantasy on Cream’s cover of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful.” Frederic Rzewski’s “Piano Piece No. 4” (1979), which Ms. Moore played at a Keys to the Future concert in 2008, turns a mournful Chilean melody into a moody indictment of the Pinochet regime, its stark opening jabs returning at the end. Timothy Andres’s haunting “How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas?” (2007) starts with a coolly sophisticated line that he punctures with little bursts. Uneasily elegiac, the piece folds in short quotes from Chopin and Mozart without becoming cute or emptily postmodern. It exudes melancholy, a sense of loss.”

Zachary Wolfe
The New York Times
29 May 2011

“Dark Full Ride”, music by Julia Wolfe featuring “my lips from speaking”….press: “this is a prismatic projection through a single soulful progression taken from Aretha Franklin’s song Think. You can hear every harmonic and overtone in Lisa Moore’s playing, which makes the piece that much more engaging and detailed.”

Zachary Wolfe
Sequenza 2

“Lisa Moore played Don Byron’s Seven Études, the centerpiece of “Seven,” her recent recording of Mr. Byron’s piano music on the Cantaloupe label. These are imaginative, playful pieces: part Romanticism, part post-Minimalism, with chord progressions supporting vocal melodies and even, in one case, audience participation (grunting and clapping). They thrived in Ms. Moore’s lively readings.”

Alan Kozinn
New York Times
May 2010

“Pianist Lisa Moore bestowed her ferocious technical skills and interpretive brilliance on two piano pieces by Elena Kats-Chernin…”

Josh Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle
March 2008

“Most impressive was Australia pianist and would-be contortionist Lisa Moore, who, while engaged in traditional ivory tickling, also slapped, stomped, vocalized and narrated”

Phillip Ratliff
Birmingham News, AL
February 2008

“Frederic Rzewski’s “Piano Piece .No.4” begins with a Minimalist gesture: a repeated note that morphs into a relentless pounding chord before abandoning the repetition and expanding towards both ends of the keyboard. Lisa Moore gave it an explosive, muscular performance and did much the same for Martin Bresnick’s Dream of the Lost Traveller, a brawny work with a mystical core, courtesy of a Blake text (from For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise), which Moore sang.”

Alan Kozinn
New York Times
January 2008

“ ‘For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise’ was a tour de force for Ms. Moore, the pianist for whom it was written. As she played music of unnervingly repetitive chords, staggered rhythms and delicate filigrees, Ms Moore also spoke and sometimes sang lines from the poet William Blake about a man’s progress through life. The music precisely accompanied powerfully simple computer animation of Blake’s drawings prepared by Puppetsweat Theater.”

New York Times
December 2006

“And, indeed, there were times when I was able to channel everything else out—the new Lisa Moore solo plus pre-recorded Lisa version of Julia Wolfe’s piece for six pianos (‘my lips from speaking’) was a revelation.”

Frank Oteri
NewMusicBox

“… suffused throughout with powerful, dense passages of fearsome difficulty, and Moore made it look easy…Moore’s thundering virtuosity…she virtually demolished the piano’s lower register at the end.”

Seen and Heard Music Web
January 2006

For Sydney Festival, January 2004
: “Lisa Moore, in her recital at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, following a stint as tutor at the Australian Youth Orchestra’s National Music Camp, played and played and played. And spoke. Sometimes speaking while she was playing. This was flawless pianism. Finely nuanced, lovingly prepared, carefully programmed, 10 out of 10. And it was just a woman and her piano. No films or slides or projections of any sort.”

Marshall Maguire
Arts Hub
2004

“This must be something to see in concert, Ms.Moore’s recitals are said to be legendary in this respect and it makes quite an effect on record as well…Moore’s astonishing accomplishment”

American Record Guide
September/October 2003

“…last Saturday the All-Stars’ sensational and sensitive pianist Lisa Moore offered the Janacek Sonata; etudes by Ligeti; Rzewski’s ”Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”; Martin Bresnick’s ”The Dream of the Lost Traveller”; and ”Wed,” by one of Bang on a Can’s cofounders, composer David Lang, a lovely, quiet, shimmering piece that is part lullaby, part requiem. Moore herself wore Levis accented by gold lame pumps…”

Richard Dyer
Boston Globe

“More profound artistically…was Martin Bresnick’s touchingly eloquent For The Sexes:The Gates of Paradise… Integral to this piece are the projections behind the piano of 17 of Blake’s engravings, which have been subtly manipulated and sequences by video artist Leslie Weinberg…”

The Australian
July 2001

“Lisa Moore executed nearly every feat known to a new musician”

New York Times

“The music on this CD is light and extrovert, but you don’t have to listen for long to realise there’s a dark undercurrent…Lisa Moore is in her element, she can camp it up when necessary, but she also finds the hidden depths.”

ABC Radio 24 Hours Magazine

“Lisa Moore played… with loving care as the audience hushed under the impact of deeply communicated feeling”

Village Voice

“I prefer her interpretation of the Scriabin pieces, all miniatures, where her ability to pounce on the harmonic skeleton and manipulate its melodic muscle makes perfect musical sense. They are all clearly and convincingly projected, passionately powerful……Blessed with a beautiful speaking voice, her delivery of the actual text (De Profundis) is clear and confronting, often profoundly moving…”

RealTime
(Adelaide Festival 2000)

“an excellent Australian pianist……it seemed at times that the pianist could not decide whether to play “Mazeppa” or “Mephisto Waltz”, so she played them both at once.”

New York Times

“Australian pianist Lisa Moore is an extraordinary champion of contemporary music. Her playing is both powerful and sensitive.”

American Record Guide

“The proportions of each element felt right and Lisa Moore’s playing was thoroughly engaged and engaging…”

Sydney Morning Herald

“She is a very confident pianist, brave sometimes to the point of risk-taking in the bravura passages, and never afraid to recognise the essential nature of the piano as a percussion instrument…she showed a clear grasp of the complex architecture of Beethoven’s music. Moreover, she knows, fruitfully, how to let the music speak for itself in Beethoven’s songful and contemplative moods.”

The Australian

“Lisa Moore’s concert commentaries, given with the same assurance as her playing, were the first to make a definite link between the arts of music and painting.”

Brisbane Courier Mail

“Two major delights of this recital were the performance of Elliot Carter’s cello-piano sonata by David Pereira and Lisa Moore, a pair of interpreters truly in tune at the highest level.”

Sydney Morning Herald

“Pianist Lisa Moore played Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms 6 for piano and electronic sounds-a beautifully executed performance of a very charming work.”

Nova-Scotia

August 18 2022 album review for Moore’s ‘no place to go but around’ (written by Olivia Giovetti in VAN Magazine)

“When did “amateur” become an aspersion? The late 1780s, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. But the etymology of the word is written across its forehead: Its roots are in the word “amateur,” French for a lover or one who loves. To be an amateur is to do something out of love.

As a pianist, Lisa Moore is far from an amateur (at least in the derogatory sense). But I can’t help but think of the word (in every other sense) as she sings the vocal lines of “To His Coy Mistress,” Frederic Rzewski’s setting of the 17th-century Andrew Marvell poem. There’s a parlor quality to Moore’s voice, almost a sprechstimmy interpretation of the lyrics, augmented by her innate warmth and emotional immediacy. It suits Marvell’s text, the monologue of a would-be lover imploring the object of his affection to spurn societal norms and return his advances. “Had we but world enough and time,” he argues in the first, almost courtly verse, the slow-burn would be one thing. “But at my back I always hear time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” he adds in the second, more urgent stanza. In the end, his lady’s honor would “turn to dust, and into ashes all my lust.”

How else to sing the pleas of a lover but amateurishly?

Text was a mainstay for Rzewski, but in his vocal music he removed singing from the exclusivity of classically-trained singers and plush recital halls, returning it instead to the domains of living room pianos, block-wide protests, and agnostic eucharists. Listening to “To His Coy Mistress,” I was reminded of an interview Rzewski gave to Sujin Kim, in which cites a piece of advice received from Pete Seeger: “Follow the example of Bach.…in Bach’s music there is always something that everybody can sing.” That feeling pervades the entirety of “No Place to Go but Around,” Moore’s latest recording of works by her friend and mentor.

The real event of this album is “Amoramaro,” a work that Moore premiered just weeks after Rzewski’s death last June, and one that the composer had written for her as a birthday present (commissioned by Moore’s husband, fellow composer Martin Bresnick). Given the circumstances, a work called “Bitter Love” is exactly the sort of piece you’d expect the notoriously prickly Rzewski to write as a gift from husband to wife. Brackish chords periodically pierce the silence, gain momentum and—like two bodies of water that meet but never mix—crash against fleeting moments of luxuriant lyricism. Seeger-like snippets of folk tunes periodically wink as they pass by, glimpses of clarity in a piece that is full of unfinished questions. Rzewski’s instructions for the score are equally ambiguous: “Love has no laws,” he writes. “Therefore dynamics, rhythms, anything can be changed at will!”

Moore takes the composer up on this invitation, heightening juxtapositions and contrast with a ruthless chiaroscuro. Some of these seem to almost describe Rzewski himself, whom Moore describes in her liner notes as “blunt, matter-of-fact, frustrating, and brilliant.” In its lawless nature, love is rarely uncomplicated. That invites a certain amount of bitterness, well worth leaning into rather than avoiding outright.

Being a Rzewski album, there is also a political element in the title work, written shortly before his career-defining “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” The first half of “No Place to Go but Around” hints at the dizzying ambiguity that can be traced through Rzewski’s works and alights in “Amoramaro.” High-velocity waves of lyricism come through and take over roughly halfway through the work via Rzewski’s musical quotation of the Italian labor anthem “Bandiera Rossa” (a tune that would also crop up in “The People United”). Moore’s lawless love for the work transforms it into nothing short of a sacrament, moving from Stockhausen-like austerity into Lisztian excess; it’s a passion play followed by transfiguration. Heeding the score’s instruction to hold the final note “to extinction,” you half-expect to look up at the end of the piece and see the apocalypse at your doorstep. For a trove of high points, however, I still can’t get over the threadbare intimacy of “To His Coy Mistress,” or Moore’s delivery of it. ”

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August 2021 – for Moore’s recording of Frederic Rzewski’s “De Profundis”  (Which Side Are You On?  Cantaloupe Music label)

“The music is beautiful, sarcastic, gripping, and Lisa Moore’s performance is superb.”  (George Grella, Bandcamp Daily, August 2021)

For solo concert “Metamorphosis” in Trondheim Cathedral, Norway Aug 1st 2019

“Lisa makes my dice too small”

“The piano player visiting Trondheim on Thursday, made the water flow. Not literally, but this was the experience she created.”
by Maria Veie Sandvik

“Water flowed into the cathedral, it was like a dream.
Lisa Moore performed on a podium underneath the main tower, between the northern and southern wing. Despite her considerable international standing, she radiated a humble seriousness. She’s got natural authority, not expressed through posing gestures, but through calmness. Already before her fingers hit the keys, we are focused. The audience sit on chairs that make a lot of sound even by the slightest movement, still the only sound to be heard are occasional suppressed coughs.

The programme of the evening is dedicated to Philip Glass, “the founder of minimalism”, who’s been working cross culturally with icons like Doris Lessing, David Bowie and Woody Allen. Glass himself describes his works as “music with repetitive structure”. In addition to Glass, the audience were treated to “Ishi’s Song” by Martin Bresnick and “Wed” by David Lang.

Swathed in blue light, Moore starts with Glass’ “Etude no. 2”. The first thing that springs to mind is waves, the water flows in, growing in volume and intensity. Even when Moore releases a key, the sound hangs in the air for a long time. It is really, really quiet, not even the squeaking of a chair, only the falling sound of the note.

In the pause before “Metamorphosis I-V”, I move myself to the front row. The light shifts again and gets warmer, from ocean blue to apricot. Are we as an audience being transformed? This year’s Olavsfest impresses, not only through the festival’s choice of artists, but also through how they are presented to the audience. Moore’s playing is ravishing, enchanting, alluring – it’s like we’re all dissolving and become one. And this doesn’t happen through works of dead classic composers, but some that are very much alive. Bresnick is present to hear Moore play «Ishi’s Song». Before Moore sits down by the grand piano, we hear Bresnick tell us about Ishi, who in 1911 was the last survivor of the Yahi tribe of California. Bresnick emphasized how both Ishi and himself had lost the opportunity to speak their native tongue, and described the piece as a requiem for Ishi, but also as a song of healing. What made the piece stand out even further, was that Moore used her own voice, not just the keys on the piano. I got a similar experience from Rossana Mercado-Roja’s performance “Sin Nombre” at the Konst-Tid festival in Åre a few days later. What do you do when you no longer know your native tongue?

Then, the water flows in again, running through Moore’s fingers. It fills the cathedral and lights up the windows. Moore impresses through incredibly precise touches. She’s brilliant, and time and time again I get the feeling she’s gonna leave us – through her sudden and surprising changes, long before the concert ends. Finally she leaves us for real, but we applaud her back and get “Etude no. 7” as a gift in return. With this encore by Glass we also get to hear her hammering the keys, this time with even greater contrast in her approach. It’s like history itself wells out of her piano.

Olavsfest’s festival theme, transformation, turned specific through Moore’s choice of material. Thursday night, Moore gave a voice to both Ishi, Bresnick and countless others.”

https://www.adressa.no/pluss/kultur/2019/08/05/Lisa-sprenger-terningen-min-den-blir-for-liten-19635543.ece

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“Moore, an honored new-music maven”
The New Yorker
January 2015

“Too many Glass recordings? Moore’s disc more than argues its case for inclusion…What becomes abundantly clear from listening to almost any bar on this recording is Moore’s highly developed, intuitive and nuanced approach to this music, one which has been allowed to evolve and refine over a number of years”

Gramophone Magazine

“Lisa Moore, an Australian pianist long based in and around New York, has always been a natural, compelling storyteller…Ms. Moore’s steely virtuosity and bold imagination showed equally during commanding accounts of three movements from Gyorgy Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, followed by three selections from his first book of Études…Dispensing with fireworks in five selections from Schumann’s Waldszenen, Ms. Moore phrased with a breathlike lyricism in the introduction and finale; between those points she showed her capacity for illuminating character, most vividly in a haughty, preening Vogel als Prophet….”

Steve Smith
The New York Times
April 2011

Stainless Staining: “Lisa Moore, founding pianist of the Bang on a Can All-stars, plays both works with mesmerizing command of Dennehy’s simmering soundscapes and finely graded dynamic palette”

Gramophone
November 2012

“Korean composer Unsuk Chin’s Double Concerto was brilliantly performed by pianist Lisa Moore and percussionist Owen Gunnell,…it is a work with striking and often beautiful textures and a good dose of spiky modernism for balance; its individual sound world was expertly realised by the London Sinfonietta under the direction of Brad Lubman.”

Stephen Wittington
Adelaide Advertiser
March 2010

“New York’s queen of avant-garde piano”

The New Yorker
October 2008

“it’s with the six pianos of my lips from speaking (here remarkably performed by Lisa Moore) that Wolfe really pushes things over the edge.”

New Music Box

“About all Ryan Brown’s “Ceramics” and David Lang’s “Wed” had in common, apart from being expertly handled here by Lisa Moore, was a single-minded focus through which simple musical materials were made to render specific evocative results.”

New York Times
April 2009 – Keys to the Future Festival

“Seven” EP press: 17dots.com

Jayson Greene
Limewire

“New York based Australian pianist Lisa Moore complemented Bittova perfectly. In some ways she played the “straight” partner to Bittova, creating intuitively minimal instrumental foils for the Czech artists’ surreal vocal excursions. But she could sweep across the keyboard in rhapsodic glissandi to mirror Bittova in full flight, or coax the audience into becoming “grunters” or “clappers” on an idiosyncratic piano etude. The evening’s repertoire ranged from East European classical and folk pieces to songs by Randy Newman and John Lennon. There were also lullabies, where Bittova’s shrill birdcalls, fingers snaps and foot stamps dissolved into graceful lyrics (in Czech, English or Russian) and luminous piano accompaniment by Moore. For the audience it was like spending a few hours down the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. Superb.”

Jessica Nicholas
The Age
May 2008

“I wasn’t as impressed as I was by Lisa Moore’s range of expressivity on both “The Dream of the Lost Traveller” (composed by her husband Martin Bresnick, based on a poem by Blake) and “Piano Piece No. 4” by Frederic Rzewski (protesting the Pinochet regime, with thunder and hope). Moore is pianist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, but alone truly distinguished herself.”

Howard Mandel
Arts Journal: “Jazz Beyond Jazz”
January 2008

“ …it was performed exquisitely with immaculate pedal and detailing, Lisa Moore thrilled with her precision and phenomenal dramatic buildup to an incredible climax.”

Sequenza 21
November 2006

“Paul Lansky’s highly demanding toccata received a performance of breathtaking ease and assurance”

Canberra Times
May 2006

“It was also bursting with ideas and sounds from the very first bars: whalelike growls produced by the pianist, Lisa Moore, playing the strings of her piano by pulling other strings across them in an act that evoked everything from the birth of cable to evisceration”

New York Times
February 2005

“This was an honest and heartfelt recital. Moore played with a feisty spirit, unafraid to probe the brooding moodiness in Janacek’s music”

Brisbane Courier Mail, Queensland Festival of Music
July 2005

“…Moore plays these (Rzewski) pieces with her customary brilliance, improvising (as encouraged by the composer) to great effect. But it is De profundis that remains in the memory. A setting, for speaking pianist, of sections from Oscar Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading gaol, it is full of invention and suits Moore’s pianism to a tee. The composer’s own recording of the piece (on Nonesuch) is wonderful, but perhaps not definitive. There can be no such thing. This work, more than most, changes its personality, depending upon who is playing/acting it. Where Rzewski has some of Wilde’s wry knowingness in his voice, Moore is far more varied in her presentation, more mercurial, and her voice is also more musical than the composer’s. Also, she is not a gay man, and so her performance tends to universalise the piece.”

Andrew Ford
ABC Limelight

“…Lisa Moore, pianist, displays all of the qualities necessary to put latter 20th century music over. Superb touch and feel, united with great emotional range and expressivity coupled with a faultless technique. All of this coalesces into warmly human playing of the highest rank capable of eliciting emotion in even seemingly totally abstract music. The Etudes displayed dexterous fingerwork and rhythmic diversity all carried off with aplomb. Again, Mr. Bresnick, like Mr. Ligeti, couldn’t be better served in his multi-media piece than by Ms. Moore. The pianopart(s) was strongly evocative of the images on the screen, with augmented dissonances, pretty melodies, alternating strenuous attacks and softly lyrical passages, with myriad tonal colorations weaving in and out…”

John Hammel
WNTI, 91.9 F.M.

“De Profundis,” Frederic Rzewski’s tender, magnificently theatrical setting of Oscar Wilde’s letters from the Reading Gaol, is one of the great scores of the 1990s, and it sounds as revelatory as ever in pianist Lisa Moore’s brilliant new recording…Also on the disc are Rzewski’s four “North American Ballads,” and the opening “Dreadful Memories,” in particular, is soft-edged and tender enough to elicit tears.”

Josh Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle
June 2003

“The whole is an uneasy amalgam of manic states to which Moore brought utter conviction and riveting virtuosity”

The Australian (for ‘The Pianist Speaks’ program)

“Lisa Moore executed nearly every feat known to a new musician”

New York Times

“Moore returned onstage a changed person-outfitted in black, her hair loose, and wearing a lapel microphone to unleash an astonishing performance of Frederic Rzewski’s ‘De Profundis’ for speaking pianist…..Moore’s considerable music theatre skills…..what impressed in all these pieces plus a set of etudes and preludes of Scriabin was Moore’s involved approach and the superb clarity of her playing.”

The Australian
(for ‘Wilde’s World’, Adelaide Festival 2000)

“Lisa Moore’s carefully concentrated account of the piano score…was beautifully done….The performance sounded first rate.”

New York Times

“Lisa Moore is a superb pianist and musician and her unusual program held one’s attention – intellectual and emotional – as well as great admiration for her playing – from start to finish.'”

Bennington Banner
(for ‘Pan Slavic Piano’ program)

“Lisa Moore mustered brilliant power and athleticism…”

Sydney Morning Herald

“There are few pianists-anywhere-who would have the technique, the imagination or the flair to attempt the program with which she enthralled us…and there are likewise few pianists who could have succeeded so brilliantly and memorably…Lisa Moore had an abundance of power for all the late romantic-early modernist elements of both Janacek and Prokofiev; she had no less command in the reflective moments of this music…Every member of the audience had a favourite from this dazzling array but there was no disagreement about the quality, the energy and the intensity of the experience we shared.”

Sydney Sun Herald

“Moore played with matching inspiration, no cliched performance this. Her slendid technique was always at the service of the music, lyric, lush where necessary and big and brassy and blue in contrasting sections.”

Albany Times Union

“The fiendishly difficult piano part was brilliantly handled by New York-based Australian Lisa Moore”

Brisbane Courier Mail

“One of those who undoubtedly maintained a high degree of mastery was the pianist Lisa Moore, guest director of this first Greenway program, a knee-bending, foot-rocking conductor of Trevor Pearce’s Fragile….and an excellent soloist in Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata, a work which manages to be visionary, irreverant and genuinely entertaining.”

Sydney Morning Herald

“The performers were Lisa Moore and David Pereira, two musicians who, if presented as overseas celebrities by the ABC, might well provoke a sensation.”

Sydney Sun Herald

For Mad Rush: “This album of piano works by Philip Glass has more life and freshness than the composer’s own recordings, themselves still vital. When “Mad Rush” begins to teem, Ms. Moore’s playing seems to escape the shackles of Glass’s processes. In the shifting chords of “Closing,” lines sing as if in Baroque counterpoint, with a fragility and tenderness that recalls Strauss. The five tableaux of “Metamorphosis,” and an arrangement of the end of “Satyagraha,” are scarcely less diaphanous.”

David Allen
The New York Times

Blog review for her solo recital Metropolis Festival May 9 2015:
”Lisa Moore packed out the Melbourne Recital Centre Salon with her programme of well-known piano works by Philip Glass and For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise by Martin Bresnick. From the beginning of Glass’ Etude No. 2 I remembered how characteristically Moore performs minimalist repertoire. She is not afraid of taking pieces a little faster than usual, adding some rubato or hammering out particular lines. After the energetic Etude, Moore invited the audience to sit back and sink into the Glass “sublime” without applauding between works. I took this as a cue to put down my notepad as well. Throughout Metamorphosis I and II I was transported back to undergraduate music, where I first heard Glass. The performance made me wish I could go forget everything and learn about music all over again….Like Blake, Bresnick draws on the most fundamental materials of life and art to produce a complex new mythology. The piano part paints the elements and stages of life described in the poem, which is read and sung by Moore throughout. Sometimes the piano part imitates the rhythm of the voice, sometimes it develops snatches of folk-sounding melodies. At one particularly weird and arresting moment, Moore trails a card over the keys while reciting the book’s poem on death and the grave”

Partial Durations
14 May 2015

For Stainless Staining: “The New York-based Australian pianist Lisa Moore is a tightrope-walker, a daredevil. She’s the best kind of contemporary classical musician, one so fearsomely game that she inspires composers to offer her their most wildly unplayable ideas. She can play them all. Her albums are like the equivalent of casting yourself in a Lars von Trier movie: You have knowingly signed up for a hellacious physical and spiritual beating in the service of Art. One of her signature pieces, Don Byron’s Seven Etudes, puts the pianist through a theater-of-pain demonstration in arrhythmia: pounding out one rhythm with her hands, she sings a series of “la-la-las” completely at odds with the piano. It’s a gripping demonstration.

Her latest record, Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers, is a dense, fiendish record that might appeal to devotees of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. The composer Annie Gosfield doesn’t just provide a loop of electronic sampled noise for Moore to accompany on her piano, she makes Moore play the sampler and the piano herself– a fact that becomes doubly mind-blowing when you listen to the record. The looping tones that ground this piece are some nasty shit: The gurgling synth loop on the second movement, “Languid and Layered”, wouldn’t be out of place on a Cash Money record. While this cacophony resounds, Moore hammers out high, brittle accompaniment on the piano. The interplay of the two is some of the most genuinely demonic-sounding music I’ve heard all year. But please, for the love of God, don’t put this on while you are cooking… or during dinner, or when you are trying to read. It would be like knocking loose a cage of tarantulas in a closed room and then lying down to take a nap. ”

Jayson Greene
Pitchfork
Feb 28 2012

“the avant-garde visionary Lisa Moore on piano.”
The New Yorker
February 2009

“Pianist Lisa Moore’s rendition of Annie Gosfield’s “Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers,” in its U.S. premiere, (@ the Bang on a Can Marathon) was a tour de force. A layered pastiche that includes prepared-piano, vintage-synthesizer and factory sounds, the jazz-inflected music was anchored by a mechanical continuo that recalled old-time railroad machinery. The combination of grand piano and well-chosen electronic samples created a 21st-century orchestra for a single performer.”

Gail Wein
MusicalAmerica
July 2008

“The pianist Lisa Moore’s commission was a set of Seven Etudes by Don Byron, who moved easily between languages, touching on blues and jazz figures, dense atonal harmonies and complex polyrhythms, posing technical challenges that Ms. Moore met confidently. There was humor as well. In one etude, Ms Moore supplied antic vocals; another required grunts and clapping from the audience.”

Alan Kozinn
New York Times
March 2008

“Lisa Moore premiered Stainless Staining (2007) (by Donnacha Dennehy) a post-minimalist study in which a dense, rhythmically steady electronic score surrounded a piano line that began as a straightforward pulse and eventually drew on rollicking figures that evoked Jerry Lee Lewis and other 1950s rockers.”

New York Times
March 2007

“ Moore, of Bang on a Can fame, has established herself as a very 21st century virtuoso-the sort of pianist who can be counted on to do absolutely anything”

New Haven Advocate
November 2006

For Smetanin’s Mysterium Cosmographicum: “Soloist Lisa Moore displayed pianism of the highest order in this premiere performance. The sustained power of her percussive chords was balanced with superb clarity and dexterous fingerwork.”

The Australian
19 July 2005

“Gosfield’s Overvoltage Rumble was a serious art-rock gas, and a veritable concerto for keyboardist Lisa Moore, who drew upon a sampled vocabulary of sampled analog-synth smudges, smears and blurts.”

Steve Smith
TimeOut NY
February 2006

“…and Lisa Moore who serves as the accompanying pianist provides great comedy and indirect commentary on the action of the play.”

Steve Smith
Charleston City Paper for Mabou Mines ‘Dollhouse’, Spoleto Festival
June 2005

“Moore presented an extraordinary program at the keyboard and microphone…her four large-scale works, each displaying monumental qualities…”

The Australian
Jan 2004

Bresnick’s Blake and Ligeti’s Legacy: “…As Moore starts to play the pulsing, determined Prologue, we meet the Lost Traveller, our Everyman companion for this 30 minute piece. He zooms on-screen cane in hand, and hurriedly moves through time and space while trees pan right, sky pans left. Musically this world is built from colouristic expressive recitative, intersticed with pulsing sections of relatively static harmonies which rock unevenly, restlessly. Moore again commands a counterpoint of voice and fingers, sometimes speaking the text to a rhythm; sometimes freer; and sometimes sung, as in the Epilogue’s slow and gentle jig addressed to Satan.

Weinberg superimposes many of Blake’s emblems onto high grain pixilated backgrounds. A child-faced caterpillar rotates, reminding us of a baby free-floating in the womb. A black & white image of worms or unweaving threads swirl like computer-generated ‘eye-candy.’ The final projection of a starry night sky above the piece’s concluding and life-affirming reiterating major 3rds dissolves to rapt applause from the audience, multiple curtain calls for Moore and the welcome appearance of composer Martin Bresnick who was in the audience.

In an era of the supremacy of visual literacy, Bresnick’s collaboration with Weinberg in For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise is an example of evolution in action, as is the creation of the Stuart piano. A coherent multi-sensorial work, it invites sustained attention from a far wider audience than ‘pure’ concert music can hope to do. The proliferation of buzzwords such as cross art form and multi-media has been used to describe many mediocre efforts. This is not one of them. And regarding the Stuart Piano, in this concert the wealth of artistic stimulus given life by Moore’s outstanding performances was so compelling, that awareness of the tool slipped from consciousness as the creations were built.”

Lynette Lancini
RealTime Online Magazine
28 July 2001

“Lisa Moore gave a startlingly good performance: she was lustrous at the keyboard, and at once engaging and challenging.”

New York Times

“phenomenal pianist Lisa Moore”

Village Voice

“The pianist has to whistle, grunt, moan, and hit various parts of the body, tap on the closed lid, and honk a car horn. At the same time there is Rzewski’s typically eclectic virtuoso piano score to deal with. Moore was in her element here and her performance was assured and compelling.”

The Australian
(for ‘Wilde’s World’, Adelaide Festival 2000)

“Lisa Moore’s playing throughout is flawless”

The Strad

“Much of the best piano playing of the Festival came from Lisa Moore. The music clearly speaks to her and she, in turn through persuasive luminous performances, ensures that the audience is immediately involved in the communicative process between performer and composer.”

Adelaide Review

“Thankfully ever more ‘unashamed’ an accompanist than her well-known namesake, Lisa Moore excels as a master colourist in both works.”

Soundscape

“Simply stunning! Lisa Moore’s playing is assertive, virtuosic, suggestive. She vitalizes each composers hard copy by communicating all the daring, insolent and sensual impulses of 20th century piano music. Her style? Poetry within contemporary virtuosity.”

The Canberra Times

“Gershwin’s jazzy melodies rang out blissfully in the careful and delicato hands of award-winning Australian pianist Lisa Moore. Her attention to inner detail brought freshness and vitality to her singing tone in soft, intricate passages, while she came on like gangbusters in the big moments.”

Albany Knickerbocker News

“Gershwin’s jazzy melodies rang out blissfully in the careful and delicato hands of award-winning Australian pianist Lisa Moore. Her attention to inner detail brought freshness and vitality to her singing tone in soft, intricate passages, while she came on like gangbusters in the big moments.”

Albany Knickerbocker News

“It’s (Copland Piano Concerto) full of jazzy, boogie rhythms mixed with touches of Rachmaninov-and the mixture doesn’t always work too well. However, it gives plenty of opportunities for the pianist and Lisa Moore seemed well-equipped to take them. Her opening passages were nicely weighted and she showed no lack of technique in the thundering runs.”

The Australian