“Listening to all 14 Sequenzas in a single span is a serious test of endurance, but there were ample enticements to stay the four-hour course. Amy Briggs, a pianist, brought a live-wire intensity to Sequenza IV…”
— New York Times
“...a ferociously talented pianist...”
— Chicago Sun Times
“The most well-rounded pleasures of the evening came from David Rakowski’s Second Piano Concerto, composed for pianist Amy Briggs. (The pair documented the piece’s writing on the blog “The Amy and Davy Show.”) Briggs has recorded most of Rakowski’s piano etudes, and accommodated the concerto’s virtuosic demands with shockingly little outward effort.”
— Boston Globe
“...cool mastery and charcoal timbre...”
— New York Observer
“Rakowski was writing for a specific performer: Amy Briggs, the profoundly adroit Chicago-based pianist who has been the primary performing means of Rakowski’s encyclopedic set of piano études, the increasingly whimsical challenges of which just seem to make Briggs more adventurously game. ”
— New Music Box
“...extraordinary...mastery of what lay on the dense, printed page and beyond...”
— Chicago Tribune
“Pianist Amy [Briggs] rounded out the program with a selection of fascinating piano etudes by Ligeti and Rakowski—music that’s fast, jittery, utterly original and literally made to order for a new-music virtuoso such as herself. ”
— Chicago Tribune
“Her youthful exuberance, technical excellence, and an obvious joy in sharing her considerable artistry with others, combined to produce performances of great quality. ”
— United States Information Service
“Amy Briggs…offers elegant, precisely shaded accounts of Ms. Thomas’s attractive Piano Etudes, presented in three contrasting, interrelated pairs.”
— New York Times
“Amy [Briggs] does a splendid job projecting the music’s wit, and her unflappable virtuosity makes even the densest writing sound effortless. ”
— Classics Today
“Expertly performed by Amy [Briggs], an intrepid pianist… a former student of Ursula Oppens, is clearly more than at home in Rakowski’s welter of demands.”
— Grammophone
“Amy [Briggs], a protégé of Ursula Oppens, brings fire and beauty to this fascinating material.”
— Fanfare Magazine
“In…pianist Amy [Briggs], a new-music soldier well versed in standard-repertoire fundamentals, Rakowski has found an ideal interpreter. The composer demands extremely complicated rhythms and fast-flying passage-work in all registers of the keyboard; in [Briggs’s] capable hands, it all sounds effortless.”
