"With his composition Brutal, Aquiles Lázaro, a young Mexican composer, turns his back on the principle that has underpinned much of Western music since the second half of the 18th century: contrast. Lázaro thus abandons any dramatic development, surprises, or trajectory leading to a climax... His music transforms imperceptibly from within, even as he demands that performers bring maximum physical tension."

"Brutal by Lázaro unfolds as a long process centered on three notes in the high register. This radical mindset ultimately tarnishes the idea suggested by the title. A brutal sound cannot be sustained over time, yet all the attacks are smoothed out by the ensemble's halo. In the end, the musicians of Ensemble Modern put down their instruments to strike triangles, a somewhat lightweight compositional idea that holds neither sonic nor symbolic interest."

"The same applied to Brutal (2024) by Aquiles Lázaro, except that here, with a minimum of monotonous redundancy and without any confessional fury, something like the essence of the nerve-wracking potential of new music came to the fore. With a nice twist: the shrill, unstoppable alarm clock, which the ensemble portrayed with all their might, gradually lulled itself to sleep."

"'How much can performers and audiences endure?' That’s the question posed by Mexican composer Aquiles Lázaro in his ensemble piece, aptly titled Brutal, which features a shrill 'concert of whistles' that transforms into an equally unpleasant jingling of triangles." 

"Conceived as an artistic response to what Lázaro describes as 'a certain vision of contemporary music that favors delicacy, subtlety, and balance,' Brutal stands as a manifesto that reclaims rawness, intensity and, of course, brutality."

"We are now going to listen to a Mexican composer that I discovered not long ago in Paris, at a concert held at the Cité Universitaire. His name is Aquiles Lazaro, he is a young composer who must be between 30 and 40 years old. He has a very interesting work, in fact, quite extreme with the piano." 

"The previous piece gave the audience some fresh air before Aquiles Lázaro delivers with Brutal his share of shrillness that resolve into a sophisticated polyphony for triangles. So be it."

"But the worst was reached with Brutal by Mexican composer Aquiles Lázaro… Impossible not to think of Les Tontons Flingueurs and their adulterated alcohol." 

"The Vienna-based Mexican composer and performer Aquiles Lázaro will play three of his own works for guitar at the concert. The pieces bear witness to Lázaro's special contemporary sound language, which he has already presented in various countries in the Americas and Europe." 

"He has maintained technical qualities that I recognized in him from the very first day: balance, a sense of form and proportion, and an exquisite rigor in capturing his discursive intentions, which he is always conscious of regardless of the path he takes or explores to develop them."

"I have been listening to Lázaro for some time and Aparición de San Sebastián seems to me to be very objective in its architectural concept, as well as very clear and direct in its message and discursive intentions. I have no doubt that it will be a pillar of his work when it is collected and studied in its entirety in a few decades." 

"We have just listened to the album MULTITUD, which brings together for the first time the piano music of Aquiles Lázaro, written over five years, by this outstanding Mexican composer." 

"Tonight, we’re heading to Mexico. Aquiles Lázaro presents his work El grupo with a rather unusual ensemble. Five pianists will perform this piece simultaneously."