Showing 21 - 30 of 71
Pure and simple
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 04/10/2013
» Nowadays you have to be ready to do some serious detective work to find a restaurant where standard Thai dishes are cooked in a way that discerning Thais of earlier generations won't shrug off.
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.
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.
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.
Flavours of yesteryear
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 24/05/2013
» They still do exist, you know: real raan khao gaeng _ curry shops _ where the cook pounds the nam prik personally and takes the time to squeeze genuine, fresh coconut cream, separating it into the hua (first pressing) and the haang, instead of opening a container of dairy milk or (in hanging-offence cases) a can of evaporated milk.
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.
Savours of the South
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 07/06/2013
» Bangkok's Chinatown is so dense with good places to eat that a committed foodie could spend years exploring the neighbourhood. As happens so often in this city of ours, an inverse relationship can exist between the outward appearance of a restaurant and the quality of the food inside.
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.
Off the eaten track
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 15/03/2013
» You can usually be sure of a good meal if you're being taken to a restaurant you've never tried before by a friend who knows what you like. A recommendation from a co-worker with reliable foodie instincts will also generally lead to good things. But there's a lot to be said for playing it less safe, heading into unknown territory for a meal at a restaurant you've chosen just because you like the look of it.
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.