Showing 1 - 7 of 7
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.
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.
Solemn magnificence
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 15/10/2013
» Beethoven himself considered the Missa Solemnis, his second setting of the Latin mass text, to be his greatest achievement. Others might lean towards one of the late string quartets or piano sonatas, or his Symphony No. 9, but when we reach this level of genius, who's counting or assigning rank?
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.
Shocker cools into a Rite of passage
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 18/09/2012
» A cluster of articles in Sunday's New York Times drew attention to an upcoming anniversary that music lovers have been anticipating for some time now _ the 100th anniversary next year of the riotous Paris premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring on May 29, 1913. One excellent discussion of the work and its birth by Stravinsky authority Richard Taruskin points out that it was Nijinsky's crude choreography rather than Stravinsky's music that caused the audience to rebel, and that there was so much noisy mayhem in the hall throughout that after the first few minutes the orchestra could not even be heard. But there is no denying that The Rite of Spring was a revolutionary score unlike almost anything that had been heard before in a concert hall and, together with Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, premiered the previous year in Vienna, its influence radically changed the course of Western music.
The curious case of Benjamin Britten
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 17/07/2012
» Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, composed for the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in 1962 (the 14th-century structure had been destroyed by bombs during the Second World War), has been lucky where recordings are concerned.
A vant-garde showcase
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 27/03/2012
» Every year since 1921, listeners interested in the directions that contemporary music is taking have descended upon the southwest German town of Donaueschingen to catch up with the latest at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the oldest modern music festival in the world. Most of the world's leading modernist composers have had a work premiered or performed there, and in recent years there have been commercial recordings to allow listeners who can't attend the festival to get an earful of the latest.