Guitar Quartet #1: In Two Movements

Guitar Quartet #1
premiered on the 1987 North American New Music Festival, when I was studying with Morton Feldman. The Castellani-Andriaccio Duo led the guitar quartet at the Burchfield Center in Buffalo, N.Y.

Al Kryszak is a composer, filmmaker, pianist & guitarist based in Maine. Work includes Turner Classic Movies, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, The New England Film Orchestra, The American Festival of Microtonal Music, Mabou Mines, June-in-Buffalo, Symphony Space, LA Directors Guild, & KINO. He is on the Creative Arts/Media Faculty at the University of Maine at Machias, Unity College & Southern New Hampshire University. Kryszak studied at SUNY Buffalo with Lukas Foss, Morton Feldman, Bill Kothe, Louis Andriessen & Lou Harrison.

REVIEWS - KRYSZAK GUITAR WORKS:

Re: 2021's Murmur Rations

The two most beautiful compositions on this CD are Murmur Rations I & II and they are almost Hackett-esque, incorporating abstract acoustic and bass lines, which build back the order out of non-rhythmical chaos, to finally grow into a very lyrical theme. Lovers of Nordic jazz (see Terje Rypdal, for instance) might also like to take notice.

- Sergey Nikulichev: Dutch Prog Rock Review

This album is a respite from crazy. It offers instead, a journey - a mesmerizing free flight of musical experience - that is meditative in demeanor, tinged with loss, buoyed by gains, and dramatic in circumstance. It is a shared moment in time with a gifted artist.

An accomplished guitarist, Kryszak plays all of the instruments on this album. That expertise showcases a distinct connection he has with every instrument he plays.

- Rick Heller: Bangor Daily News

With four full-length REV albums and several classical music and silent film score recordings distributed from his one-man operation, Kryszak continues to produce and release fiercely independent music that goes largely unheard.

His first alt-rock solo album, Lullabies for People Who Don't Need Sleep, is an intricately woven but wildly stitched pattern of acoustic composition, adorned with a light arrangement of sparse background collage that supports the subtlest, and often sweetest, of melodies.

- Guy De Federicis: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

His classical pieces are beautifully wrought, and include a lovely set of works for clarinet and orchestra (which he released as All The Luck, in 2008), several sets of piano works, and Having an Atonal Christmas, for string quartet and harp, as well as soundtrack music for silent films, including an inventive flute and guitar score for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and a piano concerto that doubled as a score for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that the pianist Anthony DeMare has recorded.

Kryszak's new Soft Clowns of the Sea (Orchard) is a bit of everything - eight songs in a folk-rock style, 11 instrumentals, some with soaring electric guitar lines, others more jazz-tinged, both harmonically and texturally, and a healthy measure of thematic recurrence and transformation, in the best classical tradition.

- Allan Kozinn: San Francisco Classical Voice