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Bangkok to hear Bartók's Viola Concerto
Life, Harry Rolnick, Published on 13/03/2018
» So many jokes have been written about the viola that it really should be pitied. Without a look of its own (the viola resembles an overweight violin), without its own sound quality (it shares three-quarter of the violin notes, three-quarter of the cello notes), stuck behind the violins in the orchestra, the poor viola is hardly singular. In fact, when Hector Berlioz wrote solo viola into the Harold In Italy symphony, Paganini refused to play it. And the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, noting how the viola shared the looks and music of other stringed instruments, called the instrument "the hermaphrodite of the orchestra".
A new Mozart?
Life, Harry Rolnick, Published on 16/10/2012
» When told he could be compared to a youthful Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an ordinary artist would modestly deny it. But Ji-yong, 21 and for a decade now one of the most interesting pianists of his generation, simply shrugged it off. Because he is anything but ordinary.