Pat Metheny brought a close to this spring's North American leg of his world tour featuring the music and instruments of Orchestrion, his latest Nonesuch release, Friday and Saturday nights at The Town Hall in New York City. The hometown crowd had much to celebrate, not least the addition of another month of orchestrion performances in North America this October, following a tour of South Korea and Japan next month and a Pat Metheny Group European tour this summer. For more information, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.

The New York Times, summarizing the crowd's reaction at the sold-out Town Hall shows, says: "They’ve never seen anything quite like this before."

Times reviewer Ben Ratliff then tries to imagine things from Metheny's perspective. "You haven’t compromised in the music for Orchestrion," Ratliff writes, "a suite, through-composed, rhythmically complex, Brazilian-ish in parts, powered by the counterpoint of mallet instruments, with sections of static harmony as an open background for your guitar solos. It’s very dense, though. You’ve made that machine prove itself."

And prove itself it does. As to any concern over whether Metheny has been able to use it to create music as fellow musicians might, Ratliff explains: "Except for some of the drumming it sounds pretty much like people playing these instruments; it seems to push robotic humanism to the limit."

Read Ratliff's complete concert review at nytimes.com.

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The night before the first New York set, Metheny and his orchestrion to the Orpheum in Boston. While the machine may have wowed, it was the man behind the music that left the lasting impression, says the Boston Herald, and "his astounding guitar playing remains at the core of his music."

Of course, that's not to say that the orchestrion itself didn't impress in its own right. "With lights blinking on the various instruments when they played, and a light show washing over the entire jaw-dropping array, it was one of the coolest, look-ma-no-hands tricks you’ll ever witness," reports Herald reviewer Bob Young. "The Orchestrion was a spectacle almost beyond belief."

At the end of the evening, though, Young concludes, "the standing ovations that Metheny inspired came not for the spectacle and technological feat, but for what a single guitar in the hands of a legend can create."

Read the complete review at bostonherald.com.