Hailed as “a composer of imposing artistic gifts” (Gramophone Magazine) and “one of the brightest stars in her generation of composers” (Audiophile Audition), Kati Agócs (KAH-tee AH-goach) creates “sublime music of fluidity and austere beauty” (The Boston Globe). Reflecting a multicultural upbringing and her own experience as a vocalist, Kati’s music gives new expression to both folk melodies and sacred rituals––and distills diverse traditions into her own unique voice that “demands to be heard” (The New York Times). A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she is also a winner of the prestigious Arts and Letters Award, the lifetime achievement award in music composition from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recordings of her music have been recognized with the 2022 GRAMMY® Award (on Jennifer Koh’s album “Alone Together”), as well as two nominations for Classical Composition of the Year in the Canadian Juno Awards.

It can be hard to understand people when they sing. Melodies are often complex; accompaniments are dense; vocalists favor the musical line over crisp diction. Millions, after all, have thought the Beatles wrote the lyric “The girl with colitis goes by.”

Proponents of performing opera in English translation — in English-speaking countries, of course — say that intelligibility is their goal. But the results are often no clearer to the audience than German or Italian would have been.

So it was no small feat that the text in “Voices of the Immaculate” — a simmering new cantata by Kati Agocs, given a resolute premiere performance by Lucy Dhegrae at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday — was entirely, word for word, lucid. What a relief not to be reaching for the program every other sentence to find out what was being sung….

By Zachary Woolf
Dec. 10, 2021