In her pre-concert talk, Lim spoke of aiming for a kind of symbiosis, of musical “organisms” working together to produce something “other”, which was greater than the sum of its parts. Interestingly, she mentioned Invisibility as an earlier example of this. How successful she was this time around, however, is debatable: I too was expecting something more (apparently) cohesive.
As for the Cassidy, you clearly heard things that I didn’t…or was unable to: I described it shortly afterwards to my no-nonsense-Yorkshireman-father-in-law as “variations on ‘really loud'”.
Hmm. That seems a curious response to the Cassidy: i’m not sure i can think of much music (at least, not much *good* music) where loudness was its defining characteristic. Even for someone like Zbigniew Karkowski loudness is merely the vehicle/context for what’s happening within. For me, throughout the wreck i just kept hearing details, details everywhere, particularly in those humungous tuttis (which, after all, are fashioned precisely out of large amounts of rapidly-moving detail). It’ll be interesting to compare with the radio broadcast and see what happens: it may well make all that detail more obvious than it was in the sound-saturated environment of St Paul’s.
In her pre-concert talk, Lim spoke of aiming for a kind of symbiosis, of musical “organisms” working together to produce something “other”, which was greater than the sum of its parts. Interestingly, she mentioned Invisibility as an earlier example of this. How successful she was this time around, however, is debatable: I too was expecting something more (apparently) cohesive.
As for the Cassidy, you clearly heard things that I didn’t…or was unable to: I described it shortly afterwards to my no-nonsense-Yorkshireman-father-in-law as “variations on ‘really loud'”.
Hmm. That seems a curious response to the Cassidy: i’m not sure i can think of much music (at least, not much *good* music) where loudness was its defining characteristic. Even for someone like Zbigniew Karkowski loudness is merely the vehicle/context for what’s happening within. For me, throughout the wreck i just kept hearing details, details everywhere, particularly in those humungous tuttis (which, after all, are fashioned precisely out of large amounts of rapidly-moving detail). It’ll be interesting to compare with the radio broadcast and see what happens: it may well make all that detail more obvious than it was in the sound-saturated environment of St Paul’s.
[…] discussed both pieces at length in my original review of the concert, and while this isn’t a new performance, this recording offers a fresh […]