Showing 1-10 of 10 results
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Serenading Italy
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 17/06/2014
» The relative obscurity of Wilhelm Stenhammar’s gorgeous Serenade is baffling. The Swedish composer wrote it in between 1914-19, under the spell of a trip to Italy. And even though there is no overt musical picture painted in the piece, you can sense the summery mood that the southern landscape evoked in its Scandinavian visitor.
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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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In a class of his own
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 29/10/2013
» Lang Lang is one of those rare artists whose name will sell tickets to people who don't normally go to classical concerts.
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New awakening for Four Seasons
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 17/09/2013
» Max Richter really means it when he says he has recomposed Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. By his estimate about 75% of the original score went out the window as he strove, as he has said, "to get inside the score at the level of the notes and in essence re-write it, re-composing it in a literal way".
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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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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.
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Perfect end to Ramadan
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 24/08/2012
» Soi Chokechai 4 is one of those after-dark eating and convening places (Sukhumvit Soi 38 is another) where open-air restaurants and an army of vendors join forces to offer dishes of all kinds to a surging and noisy crowd.
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Bartok bristles with energy
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 04/09/2012
» Bartok's two sonatas for violin and piano make no attempt to sweet-talk listeners into loving them. With their abrasive harmonies, jagged themes, and atonality only a fraction of an inch away, they ask a lot from both performers and audiences. But Bartok wrote them in the early 1920s at a time when his creative powers were at white heat, firing off one innovative idea after another.
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Ligeti revisited
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 08/05/2012
» Gyorgy Ligeti was displeased when Stanley Kubrick used some of his music on the soundtrack of his 1967 sci-fi classic, 2001, A Space Odyssey. The movie and the soundtrack album that was issued at the time of the film's release, which contained excerpts from pieces by Ligeti, were both big hits and Ligeti achieved a popularity and, most likely, a bank-account boost of the kind few avant-garde composers can dream of. But on the other hand it is true that, whatever the composer's actual intentions may have been, no one who has seen the film will be able to hear Ligeti's Atmospheres without thinking of the film's hallucinatory imagining of the surface of Jupiter, or his Lux Aeterna without memories surfacing of Kubrick's lunar shuttle skimming over craters and peaks.
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Indulging a personal vision
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 06/01/2012
» Like almost all of Terrence Malick's earlier films, The Tree of Life, the latest, most personal, and most extreme of them, has divided critics and audiences. One of the most frequent charges made against it by its detractors has been that it is "self-indulgent".
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