Showing 21-30 of 48 results
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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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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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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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Modernist links to the past
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 26/03/2013
» A blitz of concert performances and some highly-publicised new recordings of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring are currently appearing to remind listeners that a century has passed since the work's notoriously riotous 1913 premiere. But when the 100th anniversary of that other cornerstone of musical modernism, Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, arrived last year, there was not nearly as much as a fuss. The reason is that, while The Rite has long since taken its place in the standard repertoire, Schoenberg's musical "melodrama" has lost none of its uncomfortable strangeness since its first performance in 1912, and like much of the composer's work, its appearance on a concert programme is enough to ensure that much of the usual crowd won't show up.
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Kaleidoscope of instrumental hues
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 12/03/2013
» Listening to almost anything written by the modern French composer Henri Dutilleux it is hard to understand why his work was a specialists' preserve for so long.
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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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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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The unity of contrasts
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 25/12/2012
» Decca takes a chance issuing a programme like this, which features a cellist whose name will be new to many listeners playing two concertos in radically different styles.
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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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She's got rhythm
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 13/11/2012
» Is there any kind of music that is out of bounds for the American pianist Jenny Lin's stylistic perfect pitch? Her range seems limitless with each new recording revealing a new facet of her musical personality. To date her repertoire on disc ranges from Schumann and Liszt through Mompou, the early Soviet experimentalists, and Ruth Crawford Seeger to modernists as diverse as John Cage and Valentin Silvestrov. A high point is one of the finest of the many recordings of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes And Fugues.
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