Showing 1-10 of 17 results
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Mystical bliss
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 02/09/2014
» There must have been a mob of classical listeners who sensed a door opening when Chandos began releasing recordings of Danish composer Per Norgard's music in the late 1990s. Enthusiastic reviews award nominations and prizes stacked up. When the Leif Segerstan-directed account of the Third Symphony appeared, that clinched it — the work was clearly a masterpiece of the first rank by a composer, revered in his native Denmark, who had previously somewhat unknown to many (I knew him as the composer of the musical soundtrack for the film Babette's Feast).
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Searching for Prokofiev
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 18/03/2014
» Today, a few miscellaneous items and recommendations. A few weeks back while discussing Andrew Litton’s recent BIS recording of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony with the Bergen Philharmonic, I lamented the current unavailability in any format of Eugene Ormandy’s old Columbia recording of the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Litton’s account is very good, as are others by conductors like Jarvi, Weller and, especially, Mravinsky, but it was Ormandy who best traced the link between Prokofiev’s gift for long-lined, heartbreaker themes — those in the first two movements of this symphony, for example — and the achievement of Russian Romantic composers like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.
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Scaling a musical Everest
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 04/03/2014
» With the outpouring of new recordings of Schubert’s Winterreise we’ve had over the past few years, it would be sad if this one, released with little fanfare on a small, private label, got lost in the crush, because it is one of the best. American baritone Thomas Meglioranza’s earlier, 2007 disc of Schubert songs revealed him to be a natural interpreter of this repertoire, with a virile, agile voice and a knowledge of German that allowed him to respond expressively to each word of the text. Now, six years later, he follows up that programme with a performance of Winterreise in which his artistry as a Schubert interpreter has matured and deepened.
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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.
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