Selected Press

“Kubera — he has a bell on every finger.” — Muhal Richard Abrams

Pianist Joseph Kubera is an exceptionally skillful and enlightened interpreter of John Cage, Roscoe Mitchell, Robert Ashley, Julius Eastman, and other crucial figures in contemporary music. He is also a genuinely catalytic presence, promoting composition of adventurous works through his own very evident capacity to stretch limits and redefine horizons. In recent years, Michael Byron’s music has derived considerable benefit from Kubera’s formidable combination of instrumental athleticism, technical precision, and conceptual lucidity. That clarity, rigour and vigour are a perfect match for Byron’s own strengths and inclinations.

The Ultra Violet Of Many Parallel Paths…projects their creative association to vertiginous new heights. Teamed with Marilyn Nonken, a comparably awesome pianist, Kubera is in incandescent form. Frequently the surface of Byron’s music conveys an overwhelming impression of density as well as intense restlessness. Yet despite that relentless agitation, grippingly intermeshed complexity and fierce momentum, Kubera and Nonken keep the space of this dramatic music astonishingly well-lit and ventilated. They clash and send out sparks and their instrumental colouration takes on a tinge from that momentary friction. The music’s incessant flow seems to draw fresh energy from each localised collision. Even at their most turbulent and torrential, these remarkable pianists manage to preserve an essential poise within the swarms of notes and exhilaratingly reckless criss-cross of phrases, like dancers sustaining their core of balance and coordination within flurries of frenzied movement.

The Ultra Violet of Many Parallel Paths is a truly dynamic and thrilling experience. It confirms Byron as one of those contemporary composers who can justifiably be classed as crucial.

— Julian Cowley, The Wire, Issue 417, November 2018

[On the album Book of Horizons] I mentioned Kubera’s taste and curatorial skill above. As for his pianism, it’s stunning, though it never shows off in an obviously virtuosic manner. In fact, it’s only after listening for a while that you start to realize just how demanding most of this music is, since he plays it so fluently and without evident strain. The thing that I find most impressive technically is his ability to delineate layers of material so deftly that it sounds as though more than one player is involved. This is a mastery of contemporary contrapuntal practice at an often thrilling level. Again, it’s so natural that you need to tune in to the issue to start to realize how masterful Kubera’s prowess is here. A worthy addition to the discography of one of our major interpreters of new music.

— Robert Carl, Fanfare, Issue 38:1, Sept/Oct 2014

Both for programming and performance, pianist Joseph Kubera’s recital of avant-garde music can be ranked with the best of the season. The small hall was packed to overflowing, and deserved no less. Kubera is a complete technician with an ultra intense dramatic style, less like David Tudor’s than Rudolf Serkin’s. He has a kind of crackling excitement even in soft passages, one in which the tension never lets down.

— Heuwell Tircuit, San Francisco Chronicle

Kubera, a longtime advocate, more than met the challenge. His bravura command made Music of Changes feel as monumental as, say, a late Beethoven sonata. But it’s also the opposite, music as nothing but its own realization, purified of any rhetorical hierarchy. The human urge to impose order is strong, but in Music of Changes sheer providence reveals a virtuosity all its own.

— Matthew Guerrieri, The Boston Globe, June 18, 2012
Focus on Cage Makes Contemporary Feel Radical

One final word about Joe Kubera. Performance of this piece [Michael Byron’s Dreamers of Pearl] is a feat of enormous stamina. It’s unrelenting and knuckle busting. He maintains a deep, intense engagement with the music that never flags, and you can tell he’s mining it at every moment for its maximum impact. I’ve heard him in a lot of recordings by now, and sometimes in live performance. I think he may well be this era’s David Tudor—virtuosic, smart as hell, far more eclectic in his tastes than you might think, with a marathoner’s strength to deal with any transcendental performance challenge.

— Robert Carl, Fanfare, Issue 32:3 Jan/Feb 2009

Next, the stage was set for a performance by concert pianist Joseph Kubera. His piece – daring, challenging, and full of contrast; shaped by extreme time signatures like eleven-eight and seventeen-eight; and full of split-second shifts between quiet and loud and crashing and quiet again – sounded utterly contemporary. [Roscoe Mitchell’s 8-8-88]

— Nate Seltenrich, East Bay Express, March 4, 2009
Mills College Music Department Turns the Wheels of Progress

[Musical excerpt] Now, imagine something like that going on, pretty much the same texture and same intensity, for 53 solid minutes. That’s Michael Byron’s new Dreamers of Pearl (2005), just released on a New World CD by possibly the only pianist who could currently achieve such a feat, human player-piano Joe Kubera. But it’s a relentless, fanatical piece… Easily the most magnificent thing I’ve heard him do, Dreamers of Pearl is a perfect example of the Absolute Present I wrote about recently. There are no landmarks, no before and after, just a continual present with barely enough mixture of repetition and randomness to keep you thinking you’re about to figure it out. Absolutely beautiful…

— Kyle Gann, Relentless Present, PostClassic, December, 9, 2008

The Xenakis [Palimpsest, 1979], in fact, is all about incompatibilities yoked together. Its prominent piano line, played energetically by Joseph Kubera, swings between mechanistic and freewheeling, and is sometimes both at once, as one hand plays to a robotic beat, and the other scampers wildly.

— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, May 23, 2007
Music Review: S.E.M Ensemble | Picture a Pollock Painted by Harps

Listen to [Michael Sahl’s] absolutely brilliant 35-minute piano piece “Serenades” here in wonderful performance by Joseph Kubera. It is haunting music – beautiful, lyrical, surprising and, while clearly “classical” even more seamlessly colloquial than anything by his contemporaries Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Written in 1994, its compositional poise is perfect. The world has, indeed, caught up with him – all praise.

— J.S., Buffalo News, March 19, 2006

Mr. Kubera’s precise and sharp performance helped make Ms. Hoover’s work [Katherine Hoover] accessible to the audience, especially in the beautiful, almost impressionistic, lines of her “Dream,” which set up the arresting rhythmic quality of the rest of the piece, and in the intellectually challenging puzzles in “Three + Three.”

The program finished, appropriately enough, with “Solo,” an inventive, long-distance sprint, written by the festival’s musical director, Lukas Foss. Mr. Kubera was up to meeting Mr. Foss’s technical challenges, while exactingly laying down the hypnotic repetitions that give the work its expressive beauty.

— David Swickard, East Hampton Star, 2005

Cage heard a tape of pianist Joseph Kubera performing the Etudes Australes and he was thrilled. He explained that Kubera played the piece without any sense of forward motion and just made sounds, something he had not yet heard any other pianist achieve with the Etudes.

— “Blue” Gene Tyranny, NewMusicBox, 2003
88 Keys to Freedom: Segues Through the History of American Piano Music

[Beth] Anderson’s 1997 Piano Concerto, is right out of rock, with repetitive triplets and gospel noodling. Joseph Kubera was the spirited pianist in this hearty, energized fun.

— Leslie Kandell, American Record Guide, 2004