Critical Acclaim for Paul Richards
Below is a sampling of what critics and listeners around the U.S. have written about Paul's music.
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• The Palm Beach Post, January 18, 2006 by Sharon McDaniel
…The most persuasive work arrived first: the ice-breaker, Trip Hammer (2002)
by north central Florida composer Paul Richards. The work won the orchestra's 2002 Fresh Ink Competition and Mechetti premiered
it the same year.
Richards beautifully exploits a large orchestra in the succinct, 10-minute piece. Its highly defined theme, alternately lyrical and percussive, borrows from a Copland-Bernstein America. Its dynamic rhythms and surging energy borrow from Latin America.
…Trip Hammer is an accomplished, memorable work deserving wider recognition. Monday, it
got just the right start: Its 36-year-old composer, associate professor of music at the University of Florida in
Gainesville, introduced it in person on the Kravis stage.
• Palm Beach Daily News, January 18, 2006 by Joseph Youngblood
…The concert opened with Trip Hammer, by University of Florida composition
teacher Paul Richards. Professor Richards was in attendance and spoke briefly about the piece, comparing its texture to that of collage in
art or of cross-cutting in film. According to Richards, a single musical figure generates all the musical ideas of the
piece.
Those ideas assigned to the brass were the easiest to isolate: they were assertive, often syncopated, and projected
with clarity and precision. Lyric string passages alternated with animated woodwind figuration. The percussion provided
punctuation. Although the work is essentially atonal, it is not disturbingly dissonant.
Trip Hammer utilizes a
large orchestra; the audience was able to hear the sound of the full orchestra, and the sound was very good. The work was quite
well received.
• TC Palm, January 17, 2006 by Danny Kind
The evening's first work, Trip Hammer, composed in 2002, was introduced by its composer. Richards explained that, taking a
cue from the medieval mechanism for which it is named, the short work used one theme to trigger multiple ideas.
Trip Hammer was an exciting work. It opened with percolating rhythms that hopscotched back and forth between groups of instruments. As
textures and timbres shifted, so did tempos; a tuba lumbering along, with sharp jabs from the other brass instruments, would pass into a
fluid melodic passage in the strings.
• Jacksonville Times-Union, January 14, 2006 by Alyn Wambeke
… Paul Richards' brief 2002 orchestral piece, Trip Hammer, opened
the program after onstage remarks from the composer. The structure of Richards' piece, based on a steadily rhythmic medieval water
wheel, allowed for a collage of emotions and expression united by that constant tempo.
…It was a practical fit for a program of Liszt and Berlioz because it required the same sort of large
orchestra. But it complemented those 19th century works for reasons beyond the logistical: Liszt and Berlioz were both
bold innovators for their time, and it's easy to imagine they would have appreciated Richards' fresh approach to
movement and beautiful orchestral coloration.
• Jacksonville Times-Union, February 20, 2004 by Alyn Wambeke
… The premiere of Gainesville-based Paul Richards'; first symphony,
“Premonitions,” was also an emotional investment for the audience last night.
It may have been Richards' earnest on-stage introduction of his music, or our imagining his
first-night jitters, or our knowing that to get here he'd had to earn first place in last year's high-pressure
“Fresh Ink” competition --- but mostly it was the sincerity of his musical experimentation that
had the crowd rooting for his success.
It must be fun for the orchestra to have a chance at working through something totally new to them, and that
showed in their energetic performance of this rigorous piece. The five-movement composition played with juxtaposed opposites ---
tonal and atonal, frenetic and serene, popular and classical references --- to good effect. Its beautiful second movement, a gentle
imagining of an other-worldly folk song, called on the orchestra to approximate a nine-note scale, and featured some striking moments from
the ensemble's principals.
• Red Ludwig, June 2003 by Ingrid Thorson
… Paul Richards' Asphalt Gypsy comes with supple rhythmic interplays…
• Folio Weekly, Jacksonville, FL, June 7, 2002 by Jeff Grove
The JSO recognizes composer Paul Richards as number one
No question about it, Paul Richards is happy to have won the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra's
second biennial Fresh Ink competition for Florida composers (“Out With the Old,” May 14).
“What’s great about it, particularly, is the opportunity that it opens up,” Richards says by phone from
his home in Gainesville, where he is an assistant professor of composition at The University of Florida. “To write
for professionals and to get paid for it is what I’ve been shooting for.”
Still, Richards might label such competitions a necessary evil. “I wish we didn’t have to have them, but we do,” he
says. “If there was more of an audience for classical music, orchestras might be able to do what they did a hundred
years ago, which is to play mostly contemporary music with an occasional old piece.”
Richards' Fresh Ink submission, an eight-minute tour de force called “Trip
Hammer,” bustles with tuneful syncopated themes lobbed back and forth by the orchestra’s constituent sections.
At a free JSO concert on May 23, during which three finalists entries were performed, “Trip Hammer” emerged victorious.
Fabio Mechetti, the JSO’s music director, conducted the concert and judged the competition along with composer Russell Peck.
The orchestra’s musicians were polled as well, with what Mechetti calls “an overwhelming majority” voting for Richards’ piece.
“Trip Hammer’ was a better constructed, orchestrated and persuading piece from an artistic
point of view,” Mechetti says, praising Richards’ attention to detail. “His control over the thematic
materials and his ability to produce a score that, although technically demanding from the musicians’ point of view, is as close as
one can get to a finished product [knowing that Fresh Ink is a work in progress].”
Richards’ prize is a commission to write a new work that the JSO will premiere on Feb. 5,
2004. Currently fulfilling several other commissions, Richards hasn’t decided what to do for
Jacksonville. The orchestra will influence his choice through the other works on that program, and possibly by specifying a
length. With an audible grin, however, Richards says, “I’ve had daydreams about Paul Richards’
Symphony No. 1.”
• The Arizona Daily Star, May 2, 1997 by Emil Franzi
… But the CCO really proves itself in the four-movement, 17-minute Catalina Dances, by the 27-year-old Paul Richards, who’s had three works premiered by the CCO and received his master’s degree from UA. I hear Stravinsky, Walton, Hindemith, and a couple of other guys who really understood rhythm. And if that says “derivative”, so what? So was Bach. This is a complex set of dances, and like other 20th-century music that stayed in hiding during the atonal occupation, it’s fun and listenable.
• The Arizona Daily Star, May 2, 1997 by Ken Keuffel
… Performed with vigor and precision is “Catalina Dances” by Paul Richards, a former UA composition student. This four-movement work incorporates jazz and rock elements into a complex rhythmic format, without letting them sound like clichés.
• The Tucson Citizen, March 8, 1993 by Daniel Buckley
… Richards has a strong, pure melodic gift, an ear for color, and an appreciation for contrast and variety within formal constraints. His manner of combining and contrasting brass sonorities in the opening movement was very effective, as was the movement’s floating section for soft woodwinds and percussion. The dramatic finale, with its emphatic rhythms, virtuosic writing and roundhouse passing of melodic material was likewise impressive.
• The Arizona Daily Star, March 8, 1993 by James Reel
University of Arizona student composer Paul Richards pulled off an impressive feat yesterday – he
held his own against J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart in a concert by the Catalina Chamber Orchestra.
Soloist Jacquelyn Sellers joined the ensemble and conductor Enrique Lasansky for the premiere of
Richards’ Concerto for Horn and Orchestra. The orchestra commissioned the work, written especially for Sellers,
through a grant from Meet the Composer, Inc.
Richards is enrolled in the UA masters’ program, studying composition with Daniel
Asia. His concerto places him squarely in a neglected American composing tradition without sounding at all derivative.
Tonality firmly rules an aural realm in which strong rhythmic forces stand somewhat higher on the social scale
than melody.
Richards’ concerto is far from tuneless. The opening movement, in particular, displays a
strong thematic cohesion. But the work leaves its greatest impression with its forcefully cut rhythms, especially the complex,
syncopated finale.
In part, the concerto helps revive the American Neoclassical tradition that was prematurely abandoned 30 years
ago. Much life remains in that tradition, as this concerto proves.