It is becoming more and more difficult to obtain review material in this area, so the items selected below are those that this reviewer happened on and enjoyed this year, rather than in any sense the “best of the year” as a whole.
An outstanding DVD from Naxos, issued in March, was Yang Tianwa: Live in Concert at St. Petersburg (reviewed Aug. 28). It contains Tchaikovsky’s and Brahms’s violin concertos — not very original material, you might think, but in the hands of this young Chinese violinist, memorable indeed. She plays them with a tenacity and strength that’s intensely enjoyable and adds an Ysaye movement (see below) as an encore. Also included as a bonus is the young violinist playing Bach’s Partita No: 2 in a studio video recording.
Yang has also recorded the Belgian composer Eugene Ysaye’s six Violin Sonatas (reviewed Aug. 28, Naxos 8.572995). This very fine CD deserves a separate recommendation. In addition, it should be noted that Yang has recorded all of Pablo de Sarasate’s violin music on eight CDs, once again on the Naxos label, though this reviewer has yet to hear them.
The DVD of Ravel’s two short operas, L’Enfant et les Sortileges (The child and the spells) and L’Heure Espagnol (Spanish time) (reviewed Sept. 25, fRA FRA 008) was the winner of the Gramophone magazine’s awards for 2014 in its opera category. Inventive and colorful, with Ravel’s vigorously humorous music, these one-act works mark a welcome break from the usual operatic repertoire. The DVD was shown at the London Proms (the BBC’s series of summer concerts) and received an enthusiastic reception. It clearly pleased the Gramophone critics as well.
New CDs of two of Mozart’s best-loved operas, Le Nozze di Figaro and Cosi fan Tutte, (reviewed May 29 and Dec. 4, Sony 88883709262 and 88765466162 respectively) conducted by Teodor Currrentzis, proved to have many admirers this year, despite the huge competition from earlier recordings. In essence these are youthful performances, as the promotional video available on YouTube clearly shows. By rehearsing and then recording at the Opera House of Perm, in the Russian Urals, the young Greek conductor demonstrated his commitment to musical values rather than commercial ones. Most of the orchestra and soloists are young too, and given that the sound is exceptionally incisive, but the performance style relatively laid-back, these versions of these great works to take notice of. Your critic, incidentally, chose the Figaro for an important Christmas present this year.
Finally, following conductor Claudio Abbado’s death in January, the world’s classical music press was awash with tributes. The consensus was that his finest product among many may have been the DVD of Mahler’s 9th Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, dating from 2011 and issued by Accentus [ACC 20214]. His last recording was an audio CD of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos: 20 and 25 with Martha Argerich, issued posthumously (Both reviewed Jan. 30). The accompaniment is by the Orchestra Mozart, which Abbado founded.
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
March 9 to March 15 “This land produced no horses,” Qing Dynasty envoy Yu Yung-ho (郁永河) observed when he visited Taiwan in 1697. He didn’t mean that there were no horses at all; it was just difficult to transport them across the sea and raise them in the hot and humid climate. “Although 10,000 soldiers were stationed here, the camps had fewer than 1,000 horses,” Yu added. Starting from the Dutch in the 1600s, each foreign regime brought horses to Taiwan. But they remained rare animals, typically only owned by the government or
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
RSS