Selected Reviews

“Each of David Post’s superbly written…three-movement quintets adds music of a richly imaginative nature to the repertoire.”

—Laurence Vittes, Gramophone, August 202

“Post’s music is immediately attractive and finely wrought.”

–Colin Clarke, Fanfare Magazine, Nov/Dec 2021

“An elegant contribution to the body of contemporary chamber music…a composer of thoughtful eloquence with a lyrical voice that lingers in the memory long past the end of the performance…His Piano Sonata of 2015 shows a master craftsman at work.  There is an inevitability to Post’s music, as though it has always existed but just needed to be written down.  With an unmistakably open, American sound, it is nonetheless firmly rooted in classical tradition”

–Elisa Birdseye, The Boston Musical Intelligencer

“…shapely and brightly hued”

Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe, 10/7/15 reviewing the American premiere of “The Day of Light”

“Post’s elegant and eloquent music enters the listener’s consciousness with ease and leaves it with great difficulty…The sum of his musical manipulations is highly communicative, at times phantasmagoric, and vividly colorful, and provides lyrically inspired musical odysseys with unexpected, but always telling, bends in the road.”

Fanfare Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2011

“…a remarkable composer – not only inventive and technically capable but also a superb communicator.”

Music Web February 2011

(Post’s string quartets)…”are significant additions to the body of music for string quartet. Beautifully constructed, intellectually stimulating, and immediately approachable, this is contemporary music at its most engaging…The Third Quartet is a masterpiece of structural concision.”

Classical Lost & Found, January 2011

“…Written in 1999 specifically for Donna Cobert (Post’s English Horn Concerto) has a vocabulary and style evocative to some degree of the language of long-form music of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, exemplified by such American composers as David Diamond, William Schuman, and Alec Wilder. Post counts among his teachers Ralph Shapey, a fierce iconoclast whose music is not easily accessible because to fully appreciate it, the listener has to learn his particular vocabulary, taxing the commitment of the most intrepid concertgoer. Yet Post’s writing is coherent and approachable and sustained by a highly individual voice…a well-crafted work.”

The Cape Cod Times, February 22, 2010

“…Concertos for English horn, given the instrument’s somewhat reticent timbre and the resultant problems of orchestral balance are as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth… Post gets around the instrument’s projectional shortcomings by scoring his orchestra as if it were a chamber ensemble. Timbral delicacy permeates this tonal and unabashedly lyrical concerto, resulting in a piece that is able to stand beside Richard Strauss’s and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s essays for oboe and orchestra. Its most striking aspect, however, is that it is quintessentially American.”

William Zagorski, Fanfare Magazine, May/June 2003

“…Confronted by the string quartet, Post has done what all composers from Haydn (the virtual inventor of the form) forward have done – pared his musical thought down to its absolute essentials, sharpened his harmonic and contrapuntal skills, and searched for the means to make this modest ensemble sing in seemingly impossible ways…This is a fine quartet – rigorously constructed and free of gratuitous effect. In lesser hands, Post’s reliance on formally correct procedures could easily result in an arid intellectual exercise. Here, he takes the listener into the realm of intensely human communication.”

William Zagorski, Fanfare Magazine, May/June 2004

“…By far the most substantial offering was Post’s String Quartet No. 2, which has been adopted by the Hawthorne String Quartet as a signature contemporary work. Written in an accessible tonal style, the quartet includes a jazz-influenced scherzo, a lyrical and highly expressive slow movement, and two outer movements that blend a dash of French Impressionist moodiness with elements of late Romanticism and mid-20th-century American swagger. On first exposure it is a quartet that bears further hearings; the audience gave Post a heartily enthusiastic reception.”

Berkshire Eagle, November 13, 2002

“…At the end of the evening came the most ambitious and striking of the works, Post’s Quintet for piano and strings. A mammoth piece of clockwork construction and careful use of motives and micro-motives, Post’s piece had the unique quality of feeling simultaneously protracted and compressed at the same time…As miniature advances on three Czech composer’s prematurely ended work, the movements were solitary and distinctly contained, but on the whole, Post was explicit in giving the work a tight feel of overall structure…There was no denying that each second was taken into account as a part of the entire experience, a resoundingly firm notion of a multifaceted but complete thought to the piece as a whole…”

Oren Vinogradov, Llama Ledger, May 6, 2008