Showing 1-10 of 13 results
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Bringing classical music to the masses
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 09/04/2024
» In last year's award-winning film Tár, Cate Blanchett is an orchestral conductor at the peak of her fame, celebrated worldwide and powerful within the industry. But a scandal brings her downfall, and a final scene shows her exiled to a (non-specified) Southeast Asian country, recording video game background music with a local orchestra.
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A spectacular tour
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 31/05/2023
» The Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra made a triumphant return to Thailand last week after their whistle-stop tour of Europe, with three concerts in three cities in different countries, all in five days.
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What is love?
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 08/11/2022
» Thai composer Somtow Sucharitkul's opera Helena Citronova had its European premiere in Hof, Germany, late last month, and it was a stunning success.
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A classical holiday feast for all
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 02/01/2018
» Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler were two of the greatest conductors of classical music of the last century. Their approaches to performance were quite different. Toscanini believed in faithful adherence to the score, reproducing scrupulously the original tempi, the composer's written markings, the time signatures and so on. Furtwängler, on the other hand, was more spontaneous, responding to the particular circumstances of a concert: the concert hall's acoustics, the orchestra, the responses of the audience, while always, at the same time, keeping the overall architecture of the piece in mind. No two Furtwängler performances of the same work were alike.
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Thai musicians charm Bavarian audiences
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 16/08/2016
» Opera Siam and the Siam Sinfonietta are in Bayreuth, Germany, home each year to the famous Wagner Festival, for the European premiere of Somtow Sucharitkul's opera The Silent Prince, which forms part of the Bayreuth Annual Young Artists Festival. Before the opera opens members of the ensemble have performed concerts in Bayreuth and some small Bavarian towns nearby.
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Wagner, Thai-style
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 25/08/2016
» It was bold of Somtow Sucharitkul to take Opera Siam to Bayreuth in Germany, the spiritual home of Wagnerians, to perform the first opera of a cycle of operas that challenges Richard Wagner's monumental Ring cycle, performed every year in Bayreuth, as the world's longest opera cycle. Sucharitkul's The Silent Prince is the first of the 10 operas of his Dasjati cycle telling the "Ten Lives Of The Buddha", familiar stories in Buddhist culture. Somtow has already composed five of the operas, and hopes to have all 10 finished by 2020, ready for a complete cycle in a sort of Bangkok Bayreuth Festival.
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An evening of carols
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 22/12/2015
» For most British people, the Christmas season is inextricably linked with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast live from King's College, Cambridge, every Christmas Eve on both TV and radio. While the King's College Chapel Choir is the best known of the Oxford and Cambridge College Choirs, it is generally unknown that virtually all of the nearly 70 colleges have their own choir.
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From Star Wars to The Burmese March
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 07/01/2016
» Where is the closest place in Thailand to Vienna? The answer may have been last Monday, back in 2015, at the packed Thailand Cultural Centre, where the Siam Sinfonietta presented their fourth annual New Year's Concert to an enthusiastic audience.
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The Snow Dragon opera a deeply moving triumph
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 26/03/2015
» Somtow Sucharitkul's latest opera, The Snow Dragon, received its world premiere in the US earlier this month to unanimous critical acclaim.
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History, operatically
Life, Michael Proudfoot, Published on 24/02/2015
» Somtow Sucharitkul realised what his next opera production should be when he was speaking with one of his students.
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