A composer who creates new music is a special person, and so is an artist who re-creates the music of earlier geniuses. When one person can do both, the effect is musical creativity squared. Preparing for a national tour during the next few months, [Lawrence Axelrod] delighted the audience...

Reviews

Axelrod based “Songs of Yes” on the poetry of his friend Lorraine Schechter, a Santa Fe artist and writer. The texts were sung with elegance and simplicity by the ever-reliable Julia Bentley, who offered a particularly expressive and natural rendering of the poem “Pantoum for Spring”. In “Just Before Fall Equinox” the high strings were delicate, soft raindrops while the winds created the sun and the breeze.

A speaker’s voice used sparingly, and to tremendous effect in the final poem, “What he didn’t see”. The text describes an artist practicing her craft and while Bentley sang about the various scenes being reduced to paper, Janice Misurell-Mitchell changed the single word “drawing,” creating a wonderful emphasis, rather like a drum with a voice. It was tremendously effective. Schechter, who was in the audience, was visibly pleased with the results.

Lawrence Axelrod conducts "Songs of Yes"

—June12, 2010
Hyde Park Herald

The contemporary chamber ensemble CUBE bestowed their New Music Award on American composer William Bolcom last month, and before a reception with scrumptious treats, served up some of Bolcom’s most tasty music... Pianist Lawrence Axelrod had remarkable elasticity in “Nine New Bagatelles” and knew when to offer perfect clarity and when to smudge the colors.

—December 9, 2009
Hyde Park Herald

"Sentenced to Dream" by Tera de Marez Oyens

Pianist Lawrence Axelrod plays "Sentenced to Dream" by Tera de Marez Oyens.

"I Hate My Neighbors" by Lawrence Axelrod

The Southern Illinois University Percussion Ensemble plays "I Hate My Neighbors" by Lawrence Axelrod.

Death Angel by John Anthony Lennon played by Larry Axelrod

I played this work recently at a CUBE concert in Chicago.

... Other composers found beauty in metaphor, such as Lawrence Axelrod with his "Quilt Duets," a triptych on texts by Mark Doty, Jim Randone and others, affectingly sung by soprano Julia Bentley and baritone Jeffrey Strauss, with Axelrod at the piano.

World AIDS Day inspires songs and

—The Chicago Tribune, Arts and Entertainment

The composer has at least one enviable ability: It is not easy, in a time when convention no longer provides formal structures, to write persuasive and coherent half-hour spans. “To Be Danced” for piano trio, and “Moonsongs” a cycle of seven songs to various poets, last that long; the “Serenata” for 12 instruments is a healthy 18 minutes, and each seemed of a piece.

...There is a beautiful re-entry of the piano at the end of the trio, and in general the instrumental dramaturgy, so to speak, is sound. In the serenade, Mr. Axelrod earns good marks for making precise use of a narrow range of percussion colors, where so many composers would throw themselves profligately into the realm of mere sound effect.

... Mr. Axelrod conducted the “Serenata” convincingly.

—The New York Times

... pianist and composer Lawrence Axelrod continued the tradition of Mozart, Beethoven, and Rachmaninoff last Friday. A composer who creates new music is a special person, and so is an artist who re-creates the music of earlier geniuses. When one person can do both, the effect is musical creativity squared. Preparing for a national tour during the next few months, he delighted the audience...

—The Santa Fe Reporter

Using texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Axelrod’s “Anges et Déesses”, also for voice and string quartet, was more sculpted. The second poem... had an organic quality, the string quartet ebbing and swelling with human breath while [mezzo-soprano Julia] Bentley’s line floated overhead like a persistent hallucination.

—The Chicago Sun-Times

The contemporary chamber ensemble CUBE returned to Hyde Park on Sunday for an afternoon recital in the Lutheran School of Theology.
...The highlight was the sprawling work for baritone and piano, “The Immanence of Angels” with composer Lawrence Axelrod accompanying soloist Jeffrey Strauss. Jumping back and forth between texts of James Broughton and Rabindranath Tagore, Axelrod alternated between standard keyboard playing and extended techniques such as plucking the strings inside the piano case. His engrossing work captures your attention less for its lyricism than for its striking evocation of mood. Strauss sang with conviction and displayed tender understanding of the poetry.