Review of Mahler 5th (Maazel with VPO and Chailly with Royal Concertgebouw)

*This review was originally posted on Head-Fi, but since I haven't found time to write my blog for weeks, this should make an interesting addtion.*

After weeks of delay, I have finally finished my impressions of Maazel's 5th compared to Chailly's. This is also my first serious encounter with this work, so I'm going to write about my impressions on the composition itself as well.

For those who don't want to bear with my lengthy description, I think Maazel is the better recording of the two. Chailly's recording is relatively recent and that reflects on the acoustics quality, but Maazel's is a substantially better performance. I found Chailly's approach to this work too soft and lacking in context. Perhaps he was protecting us from the dark forces of life this work is so full of, but more likely he was trying to do a more calculated and smooth representation that pleases the crowd.

If you find the following review useful or at least amusing, please let me know as I have many other new Mahler CDs on the way. Listening and studying the music has been thoroughly enjoyable and I'm quite keen to do it again.

Here comes the tedious part:

1st movement opens with a solemn funeral march. The part marked as "Suddenly faster. Passionate. Wild" feels like a reflection of a bystander's mourn, as there was so much in life and now it's all lost. At the middle of Tempo I a narrator comes out as if to lead us into the 2nd movement, and towards the end of the 1st movement dynamics gradually builds up to give us a taste of what is to come.

In the beginning of the 2nd movement there is an explosive statement of distress carried over from the 1st movement. Then it falls into an alternate between joy and sadness, hope and despair, and inevitably, life and death. All of this is expanded from a single theme, which will be visited again later. Then we work our way gradually toward the brighter side, which I guess can be described as the paradise.

In middle of this movement, there were several bizzard shifts of sound placements in the Maazel recording. As if someone raised the mic a few feet and then put it back.

The scherzo is really my favorite movement of all. The contrasts are engaging and full of emotions, and require listener's full attention. This is also a great challenge to the orchestra since on many occasions they'd be driven to the limits, thus VPO really shines in the Maazel recording compared to Royal Concertgebouw in Chailly's. This is no more evident than in Tempo I, which I think symbolizes the climax of the struggle between two opposing forces. If you listen carefully, you'd notice that many solo parts were actually played by more than one player in the Chailly recording. This is a common practice in orchestras, especially with woodwind instruments, but no matter how synchronized the players are, it still doesn't sound like a solo. Unfortunately for this work it altered the context of the music and made it less than acceptable.

Then we come to the famous 4th movement. It is of course a very beautiful piece of work, and I've heard it quite a few times before. Yet it never really left much impression and on a closer listen it still doesn't. I suspect that has to do with my masochist approach to Mahler's music. However, to be quite honest, I find Chailly's performance so much enjoyable than Maazel's simply because the sound quality is better. At times the strings are on the verge of distortion in the Maazel recording, which is inconsistent with the rest of the tracks in CD.

As in several other Mahler symphonies, the final movement is full of joy and the adoration of life. The use of varied themes in this movement is quite ingenious and enjoyable. To my surprise VPO sounds much more harsh than Royal concertgebouw in this movement, but that might just be how Maazel intepretes it as the rest of the perfomance is rather solid.

When Will the Stupidity Stop?

What I can say except for dumb, dumb, dumb?

New Navistar pickup towers over offerings from Hummer, Ford - Sep. 13, 2004

The AP War

I love wireless internet. I just love it. I love it so much that even tho telecommunication is ridiculously expensive in New Zealand, I still have my phone set up ready for wireless internet. I also persuade every friend of mine to have wireless internet in their houses, and more than often take the matter into my own hands and install one for them (albeit at their expense), so I can surf the net when I'm at their place.

One little problem in this perfect wireless world of mine, is that there's no wireless network in my lab. In fact, the whole university literally bans all internet activity save www, not to mention wireless network.

But that didn't stop me and I still put a wireless AP in my lab, and it soon became the little secret among lab members. I went great length to make sure the wireless network will never be discovered. Apart from the usual WEP encryption and MAC address filtering, I also named it "Private Wireless Network" and turned off SSID broadcasting. To say this in English, you'd need to be a VERY good hacker and extremely lucky to discover my wireless network and log on to it.

All this was done for Jo, my mortal enemy at the university. She's the computer maintenance person for the department, so while I try to do everything with the university network, it is her duty to stop me from doing so. We didn't like each other from day one. She thinks I was too rebellious and I consider she too bureaucratic.

So today she wandered into our lab, and noticed that my iBook doesn't have a network cable plugged in. Knowing me as someone who can't live without internet, she quickly came to the conclusion that I have set up my own wireless network. Sure enough, it didn't take her 5 mins to locate where the AP is, and brought her supervisor over trying to disarm it. Interestingly, her supervisor is much more reasonable, and was quite amazed at how secure the AP was; but that didn't stop her from taking a revenge on my treason against her. She cited the new university regulation saying that all wireless network need to be put outside the firewall, which basically means I can't access the university printers and file servers.

So here I am now, printerless and file-serverless. The irony in this little drama is that I put so much effort trying to make the wireless invisible, but in the end it was a missing network cable that compromised my efforts. I tried to prove myself superior as a geek, but she defeated me using completely non-geeky methods.

Now if you excuse me, I need to find a way to break into the firewall and print my next report.

Amen!

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

Modern art, in my opinion, is largely a hype.

Yep, a hype. Especially those abstract sculptures. If you take the art dealers out of the equation, I don't think anybody would consider those as arts.

And most of the others are plainly disturbing, or stupid. I mean, please look at this
PDP272 AND PDP273 and tell me if you gave a bunch of toddlers some color papers and scissors they wouldn't produce the same thing?

A Little Gift

For whoever wandered into this blog and actually read it.

Send an email to the email link at the bottom of the page, and you'll receive a Gmail invitation!

Thoughts on a CO-ED from NY Times

I was in a discussion about the Beslan attack recently, and interestingly most people only made one quick post saying: "I'm so sorry to hear that. This is such a heartbreaking story blah blah blah". And that was it for them. They probably won't look back at that thread and see all the opinions some people have to offer (myself included). Most interestingly, many people choose not to look at the Muslim connection in this incident, and in some cases, deny that such link exists.

Perhaps it's because it's remote to them. A little town in mid-Asia hardly seems to relate to anything in our lives. Perhaps it's because they choose to ignore because it was too brutal and too barbaric. Perhaps it's because they don't want to be reminded of the dark side of humanity.

Yet I suspect there's something else at work as well because our media is doing exactly the same thing, but brutality and violence ARE the media's favorites. So what's keeping them?

We live in an era of political correctness. We no longer can refer to idiots on Harley's as rednecks, because that's political incorrect (oops, look what I just did). We no longer can call people who abuse their bodies for money whores because they'll never be social acceptable unless we start calling them sexual workers (but who said that profession should be socially acceptable, anyway?). And now it seems we've been ban from calling these murders muslim extremists. Instead we need to call them political activist.

People avoid references to the muslim religion, and instead try to connect everything with politics. Because politics is something everybody hates and you can never go wrong by blaming politicans. On the other hand, the problems and threats the muslim world is posing to the rest of us today, although real, are too much to deal with and best avoided.

You may argue that the Chechen terrorists acted out of a political purpose, but you can never deny they used a method invented by the muslims fundimentalists. Which brings us to another interesting point - why are we calling the terrorists fundimentalists? Is what they do fundimental to the muslim religion?

Sadly, I think it is. Although if you ask me again in front of a microphone I probably won't admit. Saying such things in a world of political correctness will probably end up very badly. It doesn't matter if you're telling the truth or not. As long as you're politically correct you'll be fine.

So in the future when each and everyone of us is threaten by the muslim terrorists, we still must remember to call them religious activists.

[Original article below]

Cult of Death
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 7, 2004

We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.