Showing 1 - 3 of 3
Bach, hot and bothered
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 01/07/2014
» Listening to this album can be frustrating — the good items are so good that the frequent duds land with an especially loud thud.
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.
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.