Showing 1 - 10 of 15
A Night to Remember
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 29/01/2015
» Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven: three safe choices for a concert here in Bangkok. And the sellout audience that filled the Main Hall of the Thailand Cultural Centre on Tuesday to hear pianist Krystian Zimerman and the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra under the baton of guest conductor Charles Olivieri-Munroe in a programme of works by the three titans knew they would be spending the evening in safe musical territory. But they may not have expected that the evening would include one of the most memorable Bangkok musical experiences in recent memory.
Mood swings and energy forces
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 03/06/2014
» No one can blame other young composers for any envy they may feel for Anna Clyne and Mason Bates. Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti appointed them as the orchestra’s composers in residence in 2010/11 and extended the appointment for the 2014/15 season. Listening to the two pieces that Muti and his Chicago musicians play on this programme, it’s easy to understand why he wanted to keep them on.
Shostakovich’s rich, poetic symphony
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 06/05/2014
» Nine is a lucky number here in Thailand, but was less so for some of the great European composers. The story goes that Gustav Mahler, a superstitious man, was especially spooked by the number nine. Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak, and Bruckner all died after competing their 9th symphonies. To sidestep the same fate, when Mahler began to write his 9th Symphony, (Das Lied Von Der Erde) he labelled it his 10th.
The Rite interpretation
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 22/04/2014
» What is it about Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring that makes its astonishing power immune to the taming effects of time? More than a century has passed since its riotous Paris premiere, but in a strong performance it retains all of its original ability to electrify audiences. Where did this music come from? Stravinsky himself admitted that he didn’t know, and described himself as “the vessel through which it passed”, as if it had a life of its own and chose him as a medium to bring it into the world. He also wrote that, as he played the newly and hastily composed piece in a piano reduction for conductor Pierre Monteux, he was surprised at Monteux’s shock, as by then he himself had come to like the music, with the implication that it was something external to him that he had learned to appreciate with increasing familiarity. Like Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Debussy’s otherworldly late music, the retribution scene in Don Giovanni, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, it is a piece that will never lose its strangeness and its ability to take receptive listeners into expressive territory that can’t be accessed in any other way.
Cruel comparisions to the classics
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 18/02/2014
» New operas certainly haven’t been in short supply over the past hundred years or so, but it is surprising how few have actually entered the repertoire, compared with the long list of favourites from the previous century. Alban Berg’s two masterpieces, of course, and some of Benjamin Britten’s are staples now, and we get performances of works by Schoenberg, Bartok, Adams, Stravinsky, Weill and a few others. But these are mostly treated as special events. New operas appear with much fanfare and then are rarely heard from again unless recordings preserve them in mummified form.
Switching strings to gorgeous effect
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 20/08/2013
» What is it about Bach's music that makes it almost failure-proof in the hands of a skilful transcriber? Bach himself was always transcribing his own work, and others have been busy at the task ever since. The non-vocal works, especially, have been rescored again and again for every imaginable instrument or ensemble. We have the Goldberg Variations for harp, accordion, string trio; organ works for full orchestra; cello suites for solo lute; the Brandenburg Concertos for synthesiser, and those are only a few examples from an endless list. But somehow it almost always works, and often even points up beauties that are not as prominent in the original versions. For some reason this doesn't seem to be true of the music of any other composer.
Illuminating a dark message
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 28/05/2013
» Listeners with an ear for the symphonies of Shostakovich and Prokofiev must have noticed the similarities between their their respective fifth and sixth symphonies. Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony as "A Soviet Composer's Reply to Just Criticism" after taking a pounding in Pravda (some say written by Stalin himself), for the "formalist", meaning too stylistically modern, music he had been composing previously. His Fifth, still his most popular symphony, is full of big tunes and optimism that made it an instant success, although the composer insisted later that its surface pleasures were a facade covering coded protest and anger.
Highly strung
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 15/01/2013
» Maybe a whole repertoire exists for an ensemble of four guitars, but before this disc came my way I had never heard any modern music with this scoring.
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.
She's got rhythm
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 13/11/2012
» Is there any kind of music that is out of bounds for the American pianist Jenny Lin's stylistic perfect pitch? Her range seems limitless with each new recording revealing a new facet of her musical personality. To date her repertoire on disc ranges from Schumann and Liszt through Mompou, the early Soviet experimentalists, and Ruth Crawford Seeger to modernists as diverse as John Cage and Valentin Silvestrov. A high point is one of the finest of the many recordings of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes And Fugues.