Boston Globe, May 12, 2017 – Excerpt from David Weininger's article announcing the Cantata Singers' May 12 performance of Wyner's “Torah Service”:

“You sing or you speak with a kind of desperation or passion that is irrational, because rarely does it really have very much external effect,” he continued. “You can’t change the weather by yelling, but you can make yourself feel better, and you can develop a sense of community. And that, I think, is what is at the heart of early Jewish worship. Not singing sweet little songs.”

​That primal wildness Wyner was seeking is easiest to hear in “Torah Service,” which the Cantata Singers are performing on a program that also includes Honegger’s oratorio “King David” and a selection of Yiddish art songs by Lazar Weiner, Yehudi’s father. “Torah Service” is written in an angular, somewhat dissonant musical language that conveys the intensity of both the joy and the lamentation Wyner saw in Judaism’s origins. Yet like every composer of sacred music, Wyner had to strike a careful balance between the competing demands of music and text. “It doesn’t pretend to preempt the prayers themselves,” he said of the music. “The prayers remain intact, and the music is commentary or a dramatization, but it doesn’t supplant the ritual readings.”

The Boston Musical Intelligencer, December 21, 2016 — “The content of some ‘modern’ music is just as human as what is thought of as ‘classical,’ composer Yehudi Wyner explained to the audience at the concert featuring his music at the Boston Athenæum on Monday evening. His explanatory remarks were well taken; although there were a number of active composers, music critics and announcers, and musicians in the audience, it was generously sprinkled with regular attendees at Athenæum events who might not have been as familiar with the modern-music scene in Boston.

“The concert was the first of three by the superb New-York-based Ecce scheduled for this academic year by the Athenæum. It offered three pieces by Wyner: Concert Duo, for violin and piano (1955), Refrain, for solo piano (2011) and Trio 2009 (2009), that ended the program. Also heard were two strong complementary pieces, Trio No. 4 (2014) by Martin Boykan (born in 1931) and Tenebrae (2013) by Martin Brody (born in 1949, and a former student of Wyner). Violinist Jennifer Choi, pianist Julia den Boer, clarinetist Liam Kinson, and cellist Seth Woods, performed. 

“Wyner’s music, probably more easily digested than that of many other modern-music composers, deals very much with emotions, in very rich textures, with wide variety of rhythms, tempi, and dynamics, and, as he noted, ‘the power of pauses and punctuation.’ The instrumentation of the Wyner compositions is inventive, often provocative, conversational, combative and bemused, by turn. His titles are often evocative. The endings of Wyner’s two latter pieces particularly left this listener with a profoundly satisfying emotional experience.”

Boston Globe, January 13, 2016 — “Collage New Music presented a deliberately crafted collage program on Sunday at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. With music director David Hoose conducting, the ensemble brought to the stage various musical colors, textures, and forms from living composers familiar and new. …

The oldest selection was Yehudi Wyner’s song cycle ‘The Second Madrigal: Voices of Women’ (1999). It was written for the nimble-voiced soprano Dominique Labelle, who was front and center for this performance. Soloist, instrumentalists, and conductor sailed through the score on a unified wavelength. Labelle paid especially exquisite attention to the texts, which Wyner selected from the international poetry anthology ‘A Book of Luminous Things.’ Except for the final text, the shattering ‘Question’ by May Swenson, all concerned feminine primping — younger women flirting with the mirror, older women cursing their wrinkles — or erotic experiences with a male lover. Both anthologist and composer are male, and considering that alongside the piece’s title raises a question: Who is really telling these women’s stories, and what kind of woman’s voice is amplified by men?”

The Boston Musical Intelligencer, January 11, 2016 — “The program’s title, ’Voices of Now and Tomorrow,’ was most literally realized in the final work, Wyner’s The Second Madrigal: Voices of Women. Composed in 1999 for performance by soprano Labelle, the work is a song cycle on ten poems by and about women that were compiled (and in part translated) by the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz. Although the composer facetiously referred to his ’mistake’ in writing it for a large ensemble of ten players, the music eminently succeeds in enveloping the singer in sounds ’worthy of her talent.’ Labelle was seemingly flawless in conveying the rapidly shifting moods of the ten poems. These range from a morning song by the sixth-century Chinese emperor Ch’ien-wen (Jianwen) through the teasingly erotic ’Second Madrigal’ by Anna Swir (from which the composition as a whole takes its title), ending with several contemplations of age and decline.”

The Boston Musical Intelligencer, December 8, 2015 – “The 85-years-old Yehudi Wyner, recently recovered from a hospital stay, was on hand and definitely in youthful spirits to hear his West of the Moon for six instruments, an equally spirited work composed just two years ago. Before this Boston premiere, Laurence Lesser mentioned a commission for the Cygnus Ensemble and a connection to Scandinavian myths (perhaps Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Duckling, reborn as a swan?). The more obvious connections were with Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire on the one hand, and the Serenade on the other, especially for the abundance of repeated notes. The other performers were Paul Biss, violin, of the NEC faculty, and four alumnae/i: Sooyun Kim, flute; Amanda Hardy, oboe; Eden MacAdam-Somer, mandolin; and Adam Levin, guitar. West of the Moon runs continuously in three broad sections, fast-slow-fast, with the first fast section containing a short slow episode. All of these alternated well-blended ensembles with broadly melodic passages for paired instruments—a melody in octaves for violin and cello, or with violin-mandolin matching guitar-cello. Unlike the heroic guitar, the high-register mandolin was hard to hear much of the time. The ‘slow movement’ featured expressive guitar chords with a distinct suggestion of jazz harmony; the guitar even had the last word in the piece, with a prominent dominant-thirteenth chord.”

New York Times, July 21, 2015 — “The revelation of the pianist Marc-André Hamelin’s perfectly conceived recital on Sunday evening at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College didn’t come in one of the Liszt or Chopin pieces. It was the contemporary work sandwiched between them: Yehudi Wyner’s ‘Toward the Center,’ a solo written in 1988 to commemorate the retirement of a longtime teacher at the Yale School of Music.”

Boston Globe, July 13, 2015 — “Wyner and Stoltzman, longtime colleagues, seemed to ruminate in tandem while tracing Wyner's musical lineage. The 1939 Sonata by Wyner’s teacher, Paul Hindemith, coursing with well-balanced neo-classicism, was given sturdy, rich treatment; Wyner’s own ‘Commedia,’ from 2003, uses recognizably similar language, but in more free-range fashion, veering from mood to mood with casual volatility. It was tailored to Stoltzman’s idiosyncratic sound and style, tone triangulating between the instrument’s concert-hall purity and its more florid jazz personality, communication generous but also almost reflexively intimate.”

Gloucester Times, July 5, 2015 — “A rare opportunity presents itself when a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and a two-time Grammy Award-winning musician perform Friday night at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival.

Even more rare are when the two are teacher and student, as is the case with Yehudi Wyner, a pianist, who was a professor at Yale University in 1965 when Richard Stoltzman, a clarinetist, was his student. ...

[O]n the program is a piece by Wyner, who taught at Yale from 1963 to 1977,written for Stoltzman in 2003 titled ‘Commedia for clarinet and piano.’

‘It’s electrifying and so satisfying to perform with him. He plays music as a composer. He’s not just reading the notes, he’s engrossing himself in the composition,’ said Stoltzman. ‘We have been playing together close to 20 years. I don’t think people realize this but composers keep changing their mind about things. (Wyner) wrote this about 12 years ago but every time we play it, he changes things, actual notes. He adds layers of meaning and difficulty so you are always challenged.’”

American Academy of Arts and Letters, February 11, 2015 — “The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner has been elected to a three-year term as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, succeeding the architect Henry N. Cobb. Mr. Wyner was inducted into the 250-member organization in 1999 and has served on its award juries and board of directors.”

Audiophile Audition, September 18, 2014 — “Wyner is a sensational accompanist, as well as a fine composer. His The Second Madrigal: Voices of Women was actually written for Labelle, with whom he has a long association, and fits fully into the French theme with its sometimes lonely scoring and emphasis on the soprano as the driving force behind the melodies. It was originally scored for string quintet, wind quintet, and percussion, and Wyner admits fear at the piano reduction because of the plethora of rich and colorful sound in the original version. But in a way I find that the reduction portrays a completely different feeling in the ascetic rigors of a lonely piano, and it fits the music and the texts—by or about women—very well.”