WQXR
The technique is superlative here, but this album is also a feat of inspired and divergent programming, and the technique tends to evaporate behind the poetry of the performances.
Roberts infuses both the instinctual and the intellectual angles of this music with equal surety.
CHICAGO READER
Her performances are dazzling technically, but the cellist isn't just a virtuoso—she's also a fearless explorer with a keen curatorial mind-set.
BANDCAMP DAILY
Cellist Mariel Roberts has evolved to become one of the most adventurous figures on New York’s new music scene—one with a thorough grounding in classical tradition but a ravenous appetite for and tireless discipline in new work.
AVANT MUSIC NEWS
Roberts’s performances are consistently exciting and never allow technique to overshadow expression.
SECOND INVERSION
We’ve all heard performers whose technical ability is so acute, and expressive capacity so vast, that we are spellbound by the music, forgetting both ourselves and that a performer is even playing. The music goes beyond subjective labels like good or bad and reaches its ostensible point: to create an entirely unique, transcendental experience. This is what Roberts has achieved with Cartography.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN
With the album’s consistent thematic unity, flawless production, and thoughtful performance, Mariel Roberts is both an expert mapmaker and navigator on Cartography.
WQXR
There was some hand-wringing in recent years over the future of new music, going something like this: With no dominant musical paradigm to rebel against, will today's young composers lack a certain edge? Won't they lose focus, now that eclecticism is the order of the day?
Cellist Mariel Roberts's solo debut, "Nonextraneous Sounds," demonstrates that any such anxieties were, to put it mildly, misplaced. The music on this disc, by a range of rising young composers, is nothing short of gripping from the first note to the last, and it's thanks largely to the intense focus of these highly individual musicians.
By playing a program this well-curated, with this much confidence, precision and good old-fashioned muscle, Roberts is not so much "making a statement," artistically speaking, as she is sounding an alarm. Listeners should come running.
TIME OUT CHICAGO
In the laboratory that is new music, with its accumulation of extended techniques, there are two kinds of performers: those who play “at” these often intractable methods, and those who organically inhabit them. Cellist Mariel Roberts spends the entirety of her outstanding debut album, Nonextraneous Sounds, in the latter category, executing demanding scores with the familiarity of a Bach cello suite.
The “lab” is generating thrilling new specimens. Piped through the catalyst of Mariel Roberts, the results are prize-worthy.
TIME OUT NY
For some string players, the music of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Schubert just isn’t enough. These fearless contemporary crusaders choose a different path, eager to push the boundaries of their instruments and unafraid to bow and pluck their way into uncharted territory.
Armed with a barrage of aural diversity, Roberts sets out to challenge listeners with an album that shows she has no qualms with pushing boundaries.
SEQUENZA 21
There is a gesamtkunst-at-werk going on here: the energetic performances, the matching of tone to the aesthetics of the compositions, the language of the music chosen, it all creates a “unified field theory” making every detail of this CD point back to Mariel Roberts as Someone to Which We Should Be Listening.
INDIGEST MAGAZINE
At only twenty-five, she couples youthful vision with startling maturity, in both demeanor and musicality.
Gymnastically leaping from jeté ponticello to obscure harmonics in the space of a heartbeat, she manages to spin an array of noises into a cohesive whole, a soloistic read on Webern or Schoenberg’s klangfarbenmelodie.
Very few cellists could execute a work like this with such impeccable attention to rhythmic detail, but Roberts executes it with finesse, and even has room to imbue it with emotion.
OUTSIDE LEFT
To say Mariel Roberts is a good cello player is like saying your smartphone makes good calls; the statement is true but ignores the capabilities and implications of what's before you.
FEAST OF MUSIC
Wednesday night's release concert in Brooklyn Heights for Nonextraneous Sounds, the new record on Innova by trailblazing cellist Mariel Roberts, bore no resemblance to such stodgy affairs
The world could use a few more musicians like Mariel Roberts.
JAZZ-SPIN
Only 24 and Mariel Roberts is making a defining statement as one of the most dazzling cellists on the New York scene.
The bow work and the multi dimensional harmonics that explode from Roberts hand combine with pre-recorded and processed cello work to again push ones cerebral cortex into sensory overload.
Improvisational classical? A critics worst nightmare. The beauty of this work is that every present quality in those gifted few of attempting to place a square peg in a musical round whole.
A delightful marriage of the abstract and the conventional with neither overshadowing the other with self-indulgent pretentiousness. Nonextraneous Sounds takes the often played out term "organic" and gives real meaning to an abstract word often used when a critic can think of nothing else to say. Free your mind.
AMERICAN COMPSERS FORUM
Roberts executes each piece with the technical flair and exquisite sensitivity for which she consistently is acclaimed. It’s difficult not to feel as though one is experiencing something profound; a significant step in a talented young artist’s career.
The technique is superlative here, but this album is also a feat of inspired and divergent programming, and the technique tends to evaporate behind the poetry of the performances.
Roberts infuses both the instinctual and the intellectual angles of this music with equal surety.
CHICAGO READER
Her performances are dazzling technically, but the cellist isn't just a virtuoso—she's also a fearless explorer with a keen curatorial mind-set.
BANDCAMP DAILY
Cellist Mariel Roberts has evolved to become one of the most adventurous figures on New York’s new music scene—one with a thorough grounding in classical tradition but a ravenous appetite for and tireless discipline in new work.
AVANT MUSIC NEWS
Roberts’s performances are consistently exciting and never allow technique to overshadow expression.
SECOND INVERSION
We’ve all heard performers whose technical ability is so acute, and expressive capacity so vast, that we are spellbound by the music, forgetting both ourselves and that a performer is even playing. The music goes beyond subjective labels like good or bad and reaches its ostensible point: to create an entirely unique, transcendental experience. This is what Roberts has achieved with Cartography.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN
With the album’s consistent thematic unity, flawless production, and thoughtful performance, Mariel Roberts is both an expert mapmaker and navigator on Cartography.
WQXR
There was some hand-wringing in recent years over the future of new music, going something like this: With no dominant musical paradigm to rebel against, will today's young composers lack a certain edge? Won't they lose focus, now that eclecticism is the order of the day?
Cellist Mariel Roberts's solo debut, "Nonextraneous Sounds," demonstrates that any such anxieties were, to put it mildly, misplaced. The music on this disc, by a range of rising young composers, is nothing short of gripping from the first note to the last, and it's thanks largely to the intense focus of these highly individual musicians.
By playing a program this well-curated, with this much confidence, precision and good old-fashioned muscle, Roberts is not so much "making a statement," artistically speaking, as she is sounding an alarm. Listeners should come running.
TIME OUT CHICAGO
In the laboratory that is new music, with its accumulation of extended techniques, there are two kinds of performers: those who play “at” these often intractable methods, and those who organically inhabit them. Cellist Mariel Roberts spends the entirety of her outstanding debut album, Nonextraneous Sounds, in the latter category, executing demanding scores with the familiarity of a Bach cello suite.
The “lab” is generating thrilling new specimens. Piped through the catalyst of Mariel Roberts, the results are prize-worthy.
TIME OUT NY
For some string players, the music of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Schubert just isn’t enough. These fearless contemporary crusaders choose a different path, eager to push the boundaries of their instruments and unafraid to bow and pluck their way into uncharted territory.
Armed with a barrage of aural diversity, Roberts sets out to challenge listeners with an album that shows she has no qualms with pushing boundaries.
SEQUENZA 21
There is a gesamtkunst-at-werk going on here: the energetic performances, the matching of tone to the aesthetics of the compositions, the language of the music chosen, it all creates a “unified field theory” making every detail of this CD point back to Mariel Roberts as Someone to Which We Should Be Listening.
INDIGEST MAGAZINE
At only twenty-five, she couples youthful vision with startling maturity, in both demeanor and musicality.
Gymnastically leaping from jeté ponticello to obscure harmonics in the space of a heartbeat, she manages to spin an array of noises into a cohesive whole, a soloistic read on Webern or Schoenberg’s klangfarbenmelodie.
Very few cellists could execute a work like this with such impeccable attention to rhythmic detail, but Roberts executes it with finesse, and even has room to imbue it with emotion.
OUTSIDE LEFT
To say Mariel Roberts is a good cello player is like saying your smartphone makes good calls; the statement is true but ignores the capabilities and implications of what's before you.
FEAST OF MUSIC
Wednesday night's release concert in Brooklyn Heights for Nonextraneous Sounds, the new record on Innova by trailblazing cellist Mariel Roberts, bore no resemblance to such stodgy affairs
The world could use a few more musicians like Mariel Roberts.
JAZZ-SPIN
Only 24 and Mariel Roberts is making a defining statement as one of the most dazzling cellists on the New York scene.
The bow work and the multi dimensional harmonics that explode from Roberts hand combine with pre-recorded and processed cello work to again push ones cerebral cortex into sensory overload.
Improvisational classical? A critics worst nightmare. The beauty of this work is that every present quality in those gifted few of attempting to place a square peg in a musical round whole.
A delightful marriage of the abstract and the conventional with neither overshadowing the other with self-indulgent pretentiousness. Nonextraneous Sounds takes the often played out term "organic" and gives real meaning to an abstract word often used when a critic can think of nothing else to say. Free your mind.
AMERICAN COMPSERS FORUM
Roberts executes each piece with the technical flair and exquisite sensitivity for which she consistently is acclaimed. It’s difficult not to feel as though one is experiencing something profound; a significant step in a talented young artist’s career.
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