| Additional Essays |
|
The Story of Hélène (2007) "The music critic Pierre Lalo, an enemy of Saint-Saëns, declared that after his two failures in his youth at the Concours de Rome, the composer had at last written a perfect cantata that could serve as a model for future candidates..." "Already by the time of Hélène, Saint-Saëns’ style had also become more austere, more restrained. Yet who can deny the opulent Romanticism bursting from the confines of Saint-Saëns’ fastidious scoring in this marvellous work, which surely deserves a permanent place in the repertoire?" The Story of Nuit Persane (2007) "The work frustrated some of the music critics who were surprised to see that the composer had written a mystical work based on a tragic vision of life and death. However most of them agreed that the composition offered the amazing aspect of a symbolist poem tinted with oriental colours..." "The cantata Nuit Persane is one of Saint-Saëns’ numerous exercises in exotisme, and comes from the pen of a confirmed orientalist who, since 1873, had been a frequent visitor to Algeria and had always maintained more than a passing interest in non-Western modes and rhythms." Wagner: Our Contemporary (2006) "One image of Richard Wagner is of a Nazi who composed bombast to accompany helicopters straffing Vietnamese villagers. The only valid element in that take-out from Apocalypse Now is that Wagner can become our contemporary. No other composer provokes so much disagreement among both lovers of Classical music and those with no acquaintance beyond soundtracks." How We Recorded the Ring (2006) "My personal approach to sound is that I look first for ENERGY and SPACE ... I knew what I wanted to hear …a halo of orchestral sound supporting the voices which are always audible and never drowned out – at the same time the orchestral colours are present and the detail is rich." "The story of sound recording and reproduction is marked with periodic breakthroughs when new technology renders the old obsolete. The cylinder gave way to the disc; acoustic recording was supplanted by electrical; the 78rpm record yielded to the long playing disc; stereophonic defeated monophonic sound and the Compact Disc, introduced in 1982, brought digital reproduction into the home. Now, two decades later, the inventors of the Compact Disc, Sony and Philips, have created its successor in the Super Audio Compact Disc." |