Word: lim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...composer, Lim won't apply a sweetener to her music. In the world of modern orchestral arrangements, this hovers somewhere between the strange and the familiar - both lush and harsh, with the ancient sounds of the Japanese harp giving way, in one piece, to the ringing of tuned glass bottles. In the shifting tones, a faint harmony seems just out of reach. Lim likens the effect to "birdsong beginning inside the egg," a phrase she quotes from the 13th century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi. Even classical audiences can find Lim's music obscure. "The point for Liza is not about...
...love is surely what the world of contemporary music feels for Liza (pronounced Lee-za), 38. Barely out of the VCA, Lim was approached by Germany's Radio Bremen to create a new work for soprano and orchestra, and the febrile Voodoo Child (1989) was born. A flood of commissions followed, climaxing last year with her most ambitious work, Ecstatic Architecture, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's inaugural season at the new Walt Disney Concert Hall. Inspired by Frank Gehry's gravity-defying architecture, the piece saw Lim's musical standing soar. In November, the Festival D'Automne in Paris...
...year residency with the Sydney Symphony, the composer this week premieres her latest work for the orchestra. Immer Fliessender (Ever Flowing) is written as an eight-minute prelude to Mahler's Ninth. In architectural terms, that's a little like adding a pyramid to the Louvre. For the piece, Lim extrapolates an Arabic inflection she detects in Mahler's expansive final symphony - "it's like the colors of that fabulous world," she says, "but a different twist - looking at it sideways." For her next SSO work in 2006, Lim hopes to reconfigure the orchestra's sound with a didgeridoo. "That...
...Born of Chinese parents in Perth before growing up in Brunei and, later, Melbourne, Lim is cross-fertilization in action. Her music embodies the process. The Alchemical Wedding, which elision premiered at the Melbourne Festival in 1996, shifts almost imperceptibly between Western and Eastern sounds, from contrabassoon to erhu (as bridegroom and bride), in a sliding scale of culture. With Inguz (1996), named after a Viking rune symbolizing fertility, the clarinet threatens to soar at any moment into Gershwin-like rhapsody, but gives birth to something else - music as anthropology. For her 2000 opera Moon Spirit Feasting, the composer spent...
...This can give rise to the stridency of Voodoo Child, which recalls the madwoman wailings of Yoko Ono (Lim's teenage heroine), but at its best her music communes powerfully with another realm. Commissioned by France's Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2001, Machine for Contacting the Dead was performed as part of a Paris museum show centering on the 2,500-year-old tomb of the Chinese Marquis Yi of Zeng. Among the objects excavated at his tomb in central Hubei province were 65 bronze bells as well as a courtly orchestra of drums, mouth organs and flutes. But Lim...