Showing 1 - 10 of 21
Hunt for harmony
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 02/02/2016
» Brahms was so intimidated by the achievement of Beethoven as a symphonist that he held off on the composition of his own First Symphony until quite late in his career. But by then he had already written large-scale orchestral works that would have no reason to fear comparison with the Beethoven scores -- the youthful First Piano Concerto, for example, has an opening as arrestingly dramatic as any of the older composer's. Most have been repertory standards for well over a century.
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).
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.
Boulez and nothing else
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 01/04/2014
» A real windfall for contemporary music listeners.
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.
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.
Bach for more
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 01/10/2013
» You say that, as a classical collector, there are at least 74 recordings that you need to buy before investing in yet another version of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos? That you already have a version of choice (possibly Alessandrini's or Gardiner's most recent account), or maybe several, that aren't likely to be superseded in your affections any time soon? Listen to a few excerpts from this set on the Linn Records website and you may decide that there is still room on your culture shelf for one more set.
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.
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.