The Berkshire Review, October 27, 2010 — Yehudi Wyner, whose career as a composer and a performing musician goes back some sixty years, finds himself entirely focused on the present at the moment, and very positively so. For one thing, Bridge Records, who have issued the most substantial body of his work on CD, have released his collected sacred music, and Mr. Wyner is very pleased to have it all together in one place. Secondly, he is anticipating the premiere of a new work, a secular cantata called Give Thanks for All Things. As he explains in the interview we now offer as our latest podcast, the work didn't come to him easily, and, although he refuses to pass judgment on it until he hears it played before an audience, he is looking forward to hearing it performed by one of his favorite groups and conductors, The Cantata Singers under David Hoose. Beyond that, he is busily at work revising his Fragments from Antiquity (1978) for a performance by his favorite soprano, Dominique Labelle, with the Lexington Symphony in February, 2011.

In this podcast we talk mostly about Mr. Wyner's formative experiences at the American Academy in Rome, musicians and composers, opera production — yes,Regieoper, too — and his own music and the musical traditions he draws upon, above all his upcoming premiere.

New York Times, August 17, 2010 — Other flavors of accessibility included Yehudi Wyner’s plush, decidedly nonangular “Passage” (1983) and Steven Mackey’s “Gaggle and Flock” (2001), with its thick double string quartet texture and picturesque sliding string figures, both on Saturday. 

Huffington Post, February 24, 2010 — Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary "serious" music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a sort of compost of the canon, from Bach to Bartok, and then everything else he's heard over 80 years, from his father's Yiddish art songs to boogie-woogie and gospel music. "Somehow it registers in the brain and has an effect," he says of the past. The other big thing you'll be hearing from Yehudi Wyner is that his music has its very bodily beginning in his hands. It's a physical, almost gymnastic test of what ten fingers can do, want to do, find themselves doing.

Life, January 31, 2010 — Composer Yehudi Wyner and daughter arrive at the 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards held at Staples Center on January 31, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.

Grammy.com, January, 2010 — Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Wyner, Yehudi: Piano Concerto "Chiavi In Mano"
Yehudi Wyner (Robert Spano)
Track from: Wyner, Yehudi: Orchestral Works
[Bridge Records]

New York Times, August 12, 2009 — ... a polished ensemble, led by Zachary Boeding’s carefully shaped oboe-playing, performed Yehudi Wyner’s rugged Quartet for Oboe and String Trio (1999).

Boston Globe, June 21, 2009 — If you go to a classical concert in Boston - one with music that really matters, whether old or new - there’s a good chance you’ll find the composer Yehudi Wyner perched near the back of the hall, surveying the scene with warm eyes and a knowing presence. Bump into him at intermission and he might dispense a wry joke or a casual but penetrating remark about what you’ve just heard. He’s not there simply for a pleasant night out but because, in short, he is one of the most actively engaged composers you will meet.
Wyner, who is also a fine pianist and conductor, an adored teacher, and the city’s all-around musical mensch-in-residence, turned 80 this month and there have been generous tribute concerts here and in New York. And a new CD out on the Bridge label finally gives listeners a chance to encounter or meet again his Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto “Chiavi in Mano,’’ in a superb performance by Robert Levin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, recorded in concert under the baton of Robert Spano in February 2005.

New York Times, May 29, 2009 — In time for Yehudi Wyner’s 80th birthday, on Monday, the Bridge label has released a splendid recording of four major works by this respected American composer, including his piano concerto “Chiavi in Mano,” awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for music.

A comprehensive musician, Mr. Wyner is an elegant pianist, a fine conductor, a prolific composer and a revered teacher. His works show a deep understanding of what sounds good and is technically efficient. His musical interests range widely. I have heard him discuss insightfully both Monteverdi’s approach to recitative and Frank Sinatra’s legato singing.

Boston Globe, September 20, 2008 — Yehudi Wyner's "On this most voluptuous night" is an arresting setting of poetry by William Carlos Williams (persuasively sung by soprano Karyl Ryczek), full of lean harmonies and sinewy expressive writing. The first movement, with its silvery sonorities and hushed violin arpeggios, seems to breathe the air of Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." David Rakowski's "Imaginary Dances" were fast, dense, and vigorous.

Playbill Arts, April 17, 2006 — Yehudi Wyner has won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his piano concerto Chiavi in Mano, Columbia University announced today.

The concerto was premiered by the Boston Symphony, with Robert Levin as soloist, on February 17, 2005. ...

In a review of the premiere performance, Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer wrote, "The allusions—not quotations—range from Baroque briskness through Prokofievian percussive motor rhythms to torch song, jazz, rock, and honky-tonk with washboard accompaniment, all viewed through the lens of a personal, flexible, and highly chromatic musical language."