Send "Sufjan Stevens " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The BQE, Sufjan Stevens' multimedia work celebrating the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, premiered in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Onstage, it was an audiovisual three-ring circus, with 16-millimeter video screening images of the roadway while costumed female hula hoopers gyrated in the foreground. Now, he has packaged the experience in a boxed set, complete with an essay in the liner notes, the DVD, a comic book, and a View-Master reel. On one hand, this is exactly the sort of quixotically huge undertaking Stevens has a weakness for. And yet, once you strip away the bells and whistles, The BQE is essentially a traditional 40-minute orchestral suite, a lightweight showpiece in which the ghosts of Gershwin, Ravel, Respighi, and other standard-orchestra-repertoire crowd-pleasers surface. In fact, until an electronic interlude crashes in about halfway through, The BQE could easily pass for the sort of palette-cleanser that might have opened a major orchestra's subscription concert in the 1950s.The fact that Stevens would devote his energy to something as unwieldy and time-consuming as an old-fashioned orchestral suite while his fans wait patiently for an Illinois followup is perversely endearing, like learning that J.J. Abrams has put the final season of "Lost" on hold so he can realize his dream of reciting The Iliad. But luckily, The BQE isn't much in need of the polar-bear-on-tricycle-style praise that greeted Elvis Costello when critics learned that he wrote his Il Sogno ballet suite by hand: "Look, it's a pop musician, and he's composing!" The BQE is a bubbly, fun, fast-paced, and deftly written piece, full of compositional fireworks, jazzy interludes, and stylistic detours....full text |
| Nytimes |
| The subject of “The BQE,” the self-described “cinematic suite” that had its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, is an epitome of New York City grime. Sufjan Stevens, the composer, said onstage that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is “one of the world’s ugliest expressways.” But his treatment channeled Hollywood glamour, with three screens of images, a soundtrack of lush, triumphal orchestral fanfares and a chorus line of five people twirling Hula-Hoops....full text |
| Guardian |
| Sufjan Stevens's symphonic tribute to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will be sold as a lushly appointed CD/DVD package with "stereoscopic 3D Viewmaster reel". Euros Childs's fifth solo album is already available in its entirety (via blog.myspace.com/euroschilds) as a free download, and is to be sold in CD form only at live shows and (at some unspecified point in the future) by mail order. The strange thing is, if you had to say which one of these records makes the best use of the album's capacity to compress an entire creative world view into a representative artefact, Son of Euro Child would win out every time. Stevens's "musical suite" was first performed by a 36-strong company as a live accompaniment to his own film footage of the silently thundering highway at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival. Roll over Matt Bellamy, tell Goldie the news: the proposition that classical might be the new pop seems to be giving us an improbably good run for our money this year....full text |
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