commented the Wall Street Journal. "All the extrovert panache of a great opera composer," raved the New Yorker. In 1999 the opera was given the honor of being screened nationwide on UK television on Christmas Day.
Asyla was Ades' first large-scale orchestral work. Rattle himself commissioned it for his Birmingham forces and they premiered it in 1997, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra giving the London premiere two years later. When the work appeared on an EMI CD in 2000 it was the only classical disc to be short-listed for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize Record of the Year, and won the Grawemeyer Prize, the largest international prize for new compositions.
It's arguable that Ades is precisely the kind of young composer Rattle is looking for -- new, but far removed from the difficult-to-listen-too obscurities of much new classical music from the mid-century years. The performance of Asyla in Taipei next Friday will be the high-point of the Berlin Philharmonic's visit, which is for the rest confined to well-loved and time-tested works.
If having a place in Taipei's social pecking-order depends on conspicuous consumption, then these two concerts will be must-see events. Top-price tickets are NT$12,000, and indeed at the time of writing only tickets at that price and at NT$10,000 were still available for Thursday Nov. 17, with tickets at NT$8,000 and upwards available for Friday, Nov. 18.
What Taipei classical audiences love more than anything else is seeing people perform in the flesh who they've seen before in the electronic media. Both Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic are well represented in all the CD catalogues. So let the feeding-frenzy commence!
The Berlin Philharmonic plays at Taipei's National Concert Hall on Thursday, Nov. 17 and Friday, Nov. 18, starting at 7.30pm. For ticket inquiries, call (02) 3393 9888, or go to www.artsticket.com.tw
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