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Solemn magnificence
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 15/10/2013
» Beethoven himself considered the Missa Solemnis, his second setting of the Latin mass text, to be his greatest achievement. Others might lean towards one of the late string quartets or piano sonatas, or his Symphony No. 9, but when we reach this level of genius, who's counting or assigning rank?
Ligeti revisited
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 08/05/2012
» Gyorgy Ligeti was displeased when Stanley Kubrick used some of his music on the soundtrack of his 1967 sci-fi classic, 2001, A Space Odyssey. The movie and the soundtrack album that was issued at the time of the film's release, which contained excerpts from pieces by Ligeti, were both big hits and Ligeti achieved a popularity and, most likely, a bank-account boost of the kind few avant-garde composers can dream of. But on the other hand it is true that, whatever the composer's actual intentions may have been, no one who has seen the film will be able to hear Ligeti's Atmospheres without thinking of the film's hallucinatory imagining of the surface of Jupiter, or his Lux Aeterna without memories surfacing of Kubrick's lunar shuttle skimming over craters and peaks.