Last spring the ensemble presented the premiere of Mr. Bruce’s “Piosenki” for two singers and large ensemble, a 25-minute setting of seven Polish poems by Julian Tuwim and four Polish playground chants. Clearly the piece was a hit with the fellows, for they played it again here, with Melissa Wegner and Kyle Ferrill as the soprano and baritone soloists.

This hypercharged work evokes the textures, colorings and character of Polish folk music, but not, as Mr. Bruce told the audience, actual folk tunes. The songs abound in pummeling rhythms, relentless dance meters, klezmer clarinet tunes, country fiddling, clanking chimes, stretches of clattering din and passages of bittersweet lyricism. Great concert.

Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, 12 Oct, 2007

The program concluded with David Bruce’s lively, intense “Piosenki,” set to the verses of the Polish poet Julian Tuwim. The instrumental music sometimes sounded like an Eastern European wedding band, over which the earthy soprano of Melissa Wegner and the baritone of Yang Yang (singing in Polish) conveyed, with flair, the whimsy and humor of Tuwim’s texts.

Vivien Schweitzer, New York Times, April 17, 2007

With shades of Janacek, Piazzola and Britten, a rich amniotic wash of muted brass, piano and woodwind, and fricative stirrings from the accordion, strings and percussion, Bruce has imagined the unknowable soundworld of the unborn child....Push! is a remarkable work: wise, sympathetic and frequently hilarious."

Anna Picard, Sunday Telegraph, 25 June 06

" It is an affecting moment when the caretaker sits up with the baby (a flashing jelly baby in an incubator) that will die. The beautiful lamentation of the Angela scene follows, but the work moves to an affirmative close as the cleaner herself has a baby (with the caretaker), and the refrain becomes, as it were, the final verse. Miura rose to her occasion magnificently — but so did all the singers. They had much to spur them on, for what marks out the opera is the composer’s relish for warmly singable lines and the expressive possibility of ensembles. This is emphatically not a “sung play”. Reynolds’s text is, in any case, a model of concision.

Economy is the ruling principle of Bruce’s score for 13 players. With its dabs of accordion, hints of piano riff, one might take it at first for skilful Gebrauchsmusik (utility music), but then come piccolo-flashes of Janacek, violin descants that glisten significantly, subtly swelling brass and a touchingly unexpected use of recorders. (They give the work its final sounds.) There is depth here as well as surface, and a sense of tonal pacing that is more than merely “effective”. When Maddy sings of “loving no one, loved by none”, there is a chord change on the last word to clinch the matter."

Paul Driver, Sunday Times, 25 June 06

"Push, the brand-new opera by composer David Bruce and writer Anna Reynolds ... took the audience by the scruff of the ears and presented us with a vocal and visual treat that was a rich (and as nutty) as a fruitcake...

The richly comic and darkly tragic episodes are brilliantly told with a nice series of linking scenes involving a tentative romance between two hospital cleaners...

The highpoint of the whole piece was a solo aria by Louise Mott playing a mother who has lost her baby and was clinging on to his fading memory. The music soared with lyrical gorgeousness reminding one of the salty marsh sounds of early Britten...

The music was in turn audacious (some wonderful writing for cello, accordion and spiky piano), cheeky and at times softly mellow (and the composer is not afraid of letting the odd tune come bursting through). An astonishing melange of panto, Wagnerian grandeur and gut wrenching sadness, Push is likely to pull people towards contemporary opera, which let’s face it, desperately needs a re-birth."

Mike Levy, Local Secrets website

"In their hugely enjoyable show Bruce and Reynolds give us not one but six very different childbirth episodes. [The show] made an excellent showcase of Bruce's mastery of different styles. The accompaniment (scored for a 13-strong chamber ensemble) mixed echoes of Britten, Looney Tunes and Janacek with an individual elan, and was consistently vivid and colourful. Bruce's writing for voice was also good...But - and this is what marks him out as a real operatic talent to watch - his management and musical texturing of stage ensemsble was exemplary, and he knew exactly when to let the music carry the emotional burden. For all the success of the madcap high-jinks, the best scene in the opera is a bittersweet love scene written with only a handful of words."

Opera Magazine, September 2006


The following preview features on Push! are also available :
The Times: It's not over till the fat lady gives birth
The Independent: When the fat lady sings