Showing 1-10 of 12 results
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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.
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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.
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Boulez and nothing else
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 01/04/2014
» A real windfall for contemporary music listeners.
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Precise handling of explosive material
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 23/07/2013
» One of the sternest critics of Prokofiev's Second Symphony following its unsuccessful 1925 premiere under Koussevitsky was the composer himself. "Neither I nor the audience understood anything in it," he remarked, softening his rejection somewhat with the remark that he "cherished the hope that it is a worthy piece of work". Still, with its extreme brutality, dissonance and gnarled counterpoint, it made few friends. Koussevitsky never programmed it again and, as far as I can learn, there were no further performances of it until Charles Bruck made this recording in 1957.
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Get Carter
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 03/09/2013
» Maybe it was Elliott Carter's passing last year just short of his 104th birthday that spurred the re-release of these recordings, much longed-for by admirers of Carter's music and unobtainable for many decades. Carter belongs on any shortlist of important modern composers, but the best recordings of his work have a tendency to descend into deletion limbo and stay there. These are times when even a new Mahler recording has little chance of making money for its publishers unless President Barack Obama or Justin Bieber happens to mention that he's been listening to it, so once again we must be grateful to ArchivMusic for restoring these very special performances to the catalogue.
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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.
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Terminally odd opera
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 25/06/2013
» Sometimes the recordings that stay in the catalogue for decades, that leap from format to format and refuse to slip into the limbo of the deleted and forgotten, are not the ones you would expect. No one is surprised that Furtwaengler's Beethoven or Toscanini's Verdi can be clicked on Amazon, but it is less of a given that the American composer Virgil Thomson's own 1947 abridged recording of his 1928 opera, Four Saints In Three Acts, should still be with us after all these years.
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Poles together
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 14/05/2013
» During his recent trip to Warsaw, my colleague sent a photo of a poster showing that the centenary of the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski is being celebrated there as something of a national event. Nice to see the anniversary of an avant-garde artist's birth treated as such a major event, but considering that the country is Poland, it is not so surprising.
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Rediscovering forgotten variations
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 29/01/2013
» Today, a miscellany of audio and video discs and downloads that have come my way recently and that may interest listeners who have not already found them.
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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.
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