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Lowdown on downloads
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 30/10/2012
» Today, a list of small items and updates. First, Alan Gilbert's recordings with the New York Philharmonic of Nielsen's Second and Third symphonies for the Ondine label, discussed recently in this column and arguably the finest since Bernstein's 1960s version, have now been made available for downloading by the eclassical.com website as 24bit/192kHZ FLAC files. At 2.4GB the programme is a hefty download, but as you listen, every one of those bytes seems to be audible in a form of recorded sound that approaches the ideal. You hear everything, but without any hint of the chilly digital X-ray effect.
Emotional explosion
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 02/10/2012
» Listeners with really long musical memories might recall the Nielsen boom of the 1960s, or at least some of the recordings that came out of it. Leonard Bernstein seems to have kicked it off internationally with a recording of the Fifth Symphony in the early 1960s which was so exciting that it was much written about and programmed on the radio, hooking a lot of listeners. When he followed through with an equally stunning recorded account of the Third Symphony a few years later, the name of a composer previously rather obscure outside of his native Denmark became well-known, and before long conductors like Ormandy, Kletzki, Morton Gould and especially Jascha Horenstein began filling the catalogue with new recordings of his work, some of them revelatory.
Fruit of the egg
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 05/10/2012
» There was a time when the Bangkok weekend market was held at Sanam Luang rather than at Chatuchak, and those who remember it as it was then will recall that it had a character very different from now. The tourism frenzy that began in the late 1980s was still many years off, and the great majority of the people who went to Sanam Luang to browse the market were Bangkok locals. It would have been unusual to spend a couple of hours meandering around there without running into someone you knew.
As good as it looks
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 12/10/2012
» You have to hand it to the Yaowarat area for its ability to keep cultural invasion and pollution at bay. The lone McDonald's that opened there a few years back packed up and left some time ago _ a first for Bangkok? _ and even 7-Eleven has only made minor inroads.
Taste of tradition
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 26/10/2012
» When a friend suggested a visit to the Sri Yaan area this past weekend for an evening meal at a restaurant called Panettone, Ung-aang Talay naturally conjured up images of a table groaning under the weight of an array of antipasti, heaped plates of pasta, a fragrant parmigiana or oreganata dish and, perhaps a pre-seasonal slice of the Italian Christmas bread after which the place was named.
Hot in the city
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 07/09/2012
» Time really does devour all things, and seems to have an especially voracious appetite for the quality of the food served at once-favourite restaurants. How many times have you gone to a place you once revered but have been away from for a few years only to find that the dish you went back there for, even correcting for the heightened allure imparted by nostalgia, wasn't quite what it once was?
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.
Northern heat
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 21/09/2012
» A craving for the nuclear heat of southern Thai food has steered Ung-aang Talay to so many southern food shops recently that when some friends suggested a visit to Gedhawa, a restaurant on Sukhumvit Soi 35 that specialises in northern cuisine, U-a T leapt at the opportunity for a change.
Flac downloads delight
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 03/07/2012
» For a long time, downloading music from the internet meant MP3 files, often compressed to the point where every vestige of atmosphere had been stripped from the music. Eventually things improved, with formats introduced that took up more space on a hard disc, but left more air around the music when heard through sensitive equipment.
Perfect end to Ramadan
Life, Ung-Aang Talay, Published on 24/08/2012
» Soi Chokechai 4 is one of those after-dark eating and convening places (Sukhumvit Soi 38 is another) where open-air restaurants and an army of vendors join forces to offer dishes of all kinds to a surging and noisy crowd.