With a 1940's big band style dance frenzy...the piece is a fascinating and compelling soundscape.  Urgently driven by Latin rhythms, the desperate dance is finally overwhelmed by the orchestration's sinister edge and driven to an explosive climax.
Santa Barbara News-Press, 1994

Conga-Line in Hell

The closest thing to a fixed style was Mr. Aguila's delicious send-up of Minimalism during his "Conga-Line in Hell."  Here, sequences in stepwise motion career out of control, a comic device Haydn also used to wonderful effect.  Mr. Aguila's deft tribute to the conga rhythm had genuine wit, its parodies of Latin America's seedier pop styles delicious and never overripe.  This elegant and affectionate music was very competently perfomed.
Bernard Holland, The New York Times, 9/94

Pacific Serenade

A Brazilian-style, Bluesy 'Serenade'
Aguila writes skillfully for his instruments, giving a clarinetist of Gary Gray's caliber ample opportunity to float long, limber lines, ...The idiomatic string parts actively interact with the clarinet's central voice, most memorably in the singing harmonics of the finale.
John Henken, The Los Angeles Times, 3/98

Piano Concerto

Closing the concert's first half, the gifted Miguel del Aguila appeared as soloist in one of his seriocomic delights, the Piano Concerto.  Terse harmonies and mock melodrama meet in this piece as the pianist rolls out florid keyboard sweeps and occasionally asks orchestral musicians to sing.  The music ends up spinning into controlled anarchy, a cockeyed grin intact.
Josef Woodard, The Los Angeles Times, 8/04

Woodwind Quintet No. 2

One of the more intriguing compositional voices to come along in recent years belongs to Miguel del Aguila, who combines classical techniques with the dance ryhthms of his native Uruguay and the Hollywood pop of his adopted California.... [The second movement] "In Heaven"...develops into a boisterous party dance with woozy sliding notes, making heaven sound like a lot more fun than it probably is.
Mike Greenberg, San Antonio Express-News, 11/98

The music shifts from rough, primitivist folk-inspired airs to Latin flavors and Middle Eastern tonalities.  As with much of Aguila's music, nothing is as straight or explicable as it might seem.  He makes contemporary music of a rugged, easy-to-digest sort.
The Los Angeles Times, 1995

The Del Aguila Wind Quintet proved to be brilliant and proved to be provocative. It is fun to listen to. ... it is also a "smoker" that will surely become part of the permanent repertory of quintet music played around the world. .... Then came the most positively ghostly music ever written: "Under the Earth." Beginning like a Mussorgskian catacombs (as in "Pictures at an Exhibition"), the long, low raspy wails of bassoon and horn were augmented by ghost sounds produced by Spence on just the mouthpiece of his flute. ... The fourth "Far Away" movement began with sudden, startling trills in alternating instruments (reminiscent of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkryies"), but in del Aguila's music the trills erupt into a busy score full of tweedlings and tootings that sound like a busy city street scene. ... which gathers more and more steam until its crashing, final end.
Hillary Hauser, Santa Barbara News-Press, 1/95

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