Showing 1 - 4 of 4
In praise of crazy
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 01/03/2016
» There is a story by the American writer Donald Barthelme in which a condemned man is offered the chance to hear one last song before he is executed. He requests Charles Ives' Fourth Symphony, a good choice because with its demand for a huge orchestra, chorus, organ, three pianos (one tuned in quarter-tones), and ultra-complex scoring, the wait involved in preparing a performance would be sure to keep him alive for a long time.
Searching for Prokofiev
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 18/03/2014
» Today, a few miscellaneous items and recommendations. A few weeks back while discussing Andrew Litton’s recent BIS recording of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony with the Bergen Philharmonic, I lamented the current unavailability in any format of Eugene Ormandy’s old Columbia recording of the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Litton’s account is very good, as are others by conductors like Jarvi, Weller and, especially, Mravinsky, but it was Ormandy who best traced the link between Prokofiev’s gift for long-lined, heartbreaker themes — those in the first two movements of this symphony, for example — and the achievement of Russian Romantic composers like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.
Sonic declarations of independence
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 11/12/2012
» Maverick artists _ those who stake out creative territory completely their own and cultivate it in uniquely personal ways _ have been prominent in American culture and have given the country much of its greatest art. Fiction, painting and film all offer remarkable examples of maverick art, but it is probably in music that the tradition is at its peak.
Bartok and other download delights
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 10/04/2012
» Anyone who has tried to shop for classical discs recently here in Bangkok is aware of the toll that downloading has taken on the CD industry. But even with many CD and DVD companies going into defensive mode and encoding their discs in SACD or other multichannel formats that cannot, as far as I know, be easily accessed in download form, nothing is going to reverse this trend any time soon.