(cover image by Christin Hume) Apologies in no particular order to: Charles-Marie Widor Jacques Ibert Rameau Cécile Chaminade Tristan Murail André Jolivet Pierre Capdeveille Jean Rivier Francis Poulenc Andre Gedalge Paul Le Flem Yves Ramette Henri Sauguet …among many others, … Continue reading The French Symphony in Review
with Leonidas Kavakos under Herbert Blomstedt Well, add one more to the list. Yet another world-class orchestra comes through Taipei, with a world-class conductor and soloist. I’ll be honest. When I heard about this concert many months ago, my first … Continue reading Gewandhausorchester Leipzig in Taiwan
(cover image by Ian Dooley) The series is available, in reverse chronological order, here. This has been one of the most exciting series we’ve done. There has been such a wide spectrum of styles and approaches, but really just excellent … Continue reading The American Symphony in Review
(cover image by Ian Baldwin) I started this (last) month’s series by talking about how difficult it was for me to appreciate and discover opera the way I listen to music (headphones, no visuals, no subtitles, etc.), but I discovered … Continue reading A Month of Opera in Review
Phew. The series can be reviewed here. That was a ton of music. And really it’s a testament to how much excellent music there is from that small little corner of the world up there off the coast of mainland … Continue reading The English Symphony in Review
It was almost six months ago to the day that I first knew that the Quatuor Diotima would be visiting Taiwan, and that was the same week I posted an article I spent a lot of time preparing for, only to share … Continue reading Quatuor Diotima in Taipei
Needless to repeat, but I shall, that none of my series are comprehensive; there’s no way they can be. The blog as an entire entity is not comprehensive. But I think in this challenging and intense month of listening and writing (the … Continue reading Darmstadt 2016: A Review
I’m going to be saying this a lot this season, but this is a concert I’ve been looking forward to for months. The last concert I attended at our National Concert Hall was on May 28, over four months ago. … Continue reading Concert Review: NSO: A ‘Great’ Symphony
Tenor vocal recital In case you didn’t know, Austrians are intense people… In my write-ups on concerts, I do my best to address the concert and not the pieces themselves, but that’s hard to do in some ways, especially when you’re not super familiar with said pieces. In any case, last year, I went to see Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder performed by our very fine National Symphony Orchestra. As you dedicated readers will know, it demands some serious forces, and one of those is a tenor. The tenor’s performance (both musically and… acting-ly? dramatically?) was excellent, and I actually ended up making … Continue reading Concert Review: 4.27 男高音湯發凱獨唱會
台北愛樂管弦樂團 This concert was the day after the previous concert review, the one with Mo. Antoni Wit, and if you look at the two programs, it could also tenuously be called “Paganini Variations Part 2.” I don’t seem to have recalled hearing the Taipei Philharmonic before. For clarification’s sake, the previous day’s ensemble is the Taiwan Philharmonic, but only in English. Their Chinese name (國家交響樂團) translates to English as the National Symphony Orchestra. You can see how that may be confusing, but in any case, they’re different. I expressed in that article my continued and growing adoration for the NSO, … Continue reading Concert Review: Taipei Philharmonic 30th Anniversary Concert
I was thinking the other day who could possibly be the most-featured composer on our little site so far. I started taking a mental tally of what pieces we’d done by each composer (Mozart Monday aside), and I THINK I have come up with the right answer. My thought, though, was that if I’d completely forgotten a piece I’d done by a composer I remember having worked on, then maybe I should go over it again. I’m not going to include links to my referenced posts here; there would be literally dozens of them. They’re terribly interesting though; you should … Continue reading A Mental Inventory
Fugue for Thought 