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“[Adam] Schoenberg possesses a directly approachable compositional idiom, marked by a sweet-toothed tonal language, widely spaced chords and generous orchestral textures.… [Finding Rothko]’s four movements – ‘Orange,’ ‘Yellow,’ ‘Red,’ and ‘Wine’ – trace a cinematic sweep, peaking with the fusillade of percussion and brass and the nervous swirl of high winds and strings in ‘Red.’… [With American Symphony], Schoenberg has produced an expertly crafted paean to American-ness. Its most stirring moments come in the meditative ‘White on Blue,’ which may be heard equally as a wonder-filled gaze at a vast sky or at the stars spangling the American banner.… Even at its most sturm-und-drang (the angular ‘Kandinsky’), Picture Studies is an amiable essay in 20th-century American neo-Romanticism, containing echoes of Samuel Barber and Howard Hanson (‘Olive Orchard’), as well as shades of Bernsteinian showmanship (the jazz inflection of ‘Miró’).” —Patrick Castillo, WQXR

Read the full review and stream the album on WQXR