Classical music
Do we have many fans here? I'm aware of the recently departed Rossweisse... but I'm not sure otherwise.
I'm obsessed with chamber music in particular at times, including right now. Preserving my sanity on some days. Dvorak. I can't get enough of Dvorak. Or Faure.
EDIT: Or Haydn. Given that I have about 15 discs of Haydn on their way to me (piano trios, string quartets, filling a symphony gap) I shouldn't forget Haydn.
I'm obsessed with chamber music in particular at times, including right now. Preserving my sanity on some days. Dvorak. I can't get enough of Dvorak. Or Faure.
EDIT: Or Haydn. Given that I have about 15 discs of Haydn on their way to me (piano trios, string quartets, filling a symphony gap) I shouldn't forget Haydn.

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I have a subscription to the Berlin Phil Internet stream. This we watched over the stresstive season rather than the garbage elsewhere.
More musical obsessions revealed on request. This is not the time, though for a renewed study of 'Winterreise'. More Bach Christmas Oratorios, perhaps to relieve the lockdown blues.
My tastes range very broadly. I had a life-altering experience in seeing/hearing The Ring Cycle in 2006. I've wept at Shostakovich's 5th Symphony (conducted by his son, Maksim), and I love his string quartets. So much a Shostakovich geek that I once attended a seminar given by Richard Taruskin. I see (or, saw, in The Before Time) about three or four operas a season. The Canadian Opera Company has a particular strength in 20thC opera. And I've seen a great performance of..... Orfeo.
And Shostakovich is worth geeking over. My collection expanded rapidly only 1-2 years ago.
Classical streaming services have come of age and I personally use Primephonic**, it tends to lead to me exploring particular composers in depth more than scattering across composers, though that does happen sometimes. And it also leads me to trying different recordings of pieces I didn't "get" and discovering that a different recording can bring rewards. Right at this moment I'm discovering I do like Beethoven's Violin Concerto after all, when the first movement isn't played at a crawl.
**Idagio also seems good.
*I hasten to add that I was not the soloist. I was playing cello in the orchestra.
Well played, madame.
I find it excessively massive. I own one box of it (voice and orchestra), but when I investigated I felt that many parts of it were 'complete' to a fault, with every revision and scrap of an idea they could find.
Does anyone really need to spend a quarter of an hour listening to 50 themes Sibelius sketched out for piano? Not pieces. Themes.
It started looking like poorer value for money once I realised that some of the boxes had about twice as many discs as they really needed.
Anyway. That's a raw nerve. But I do like the Voice & Orchestra box!
I do like Beethoven, Dvorak & Shostakovich as others have mentioned (bits of the piano concerto in F bring me to tears almost every time I hear it). Mostly orchestral works.
I have a soft spot for Gershwin's piano concerto in a similar way to LVER's soft spot for the Beethoven Violin concerto: I've played it.... as a second violinist. But it's a lot of fun, which is why it sticks more than some of the other concerti for which I've second fiddled.
I confess to not being a great fan of Mozart though.
Ah, that wonderful concerto! My father and I saw it performed by Rachel Barton Pine at our local symphony. We fell in love with the piece and her. I bought her cd recording and we would just sit and listen to it on occasion. Good memories.
Besides Beethoven, I daily listen to Renaissance music on Pandora. I can hardly ID any specific pieces, but I enjoy Tallis and Gesualdo (shhh! murderer! but incredible composer)
And I'm subscribed to KUSC our local non-profit classical station. If you want to listen to good classical variety without commercials, you could do worse than check out KUSC online.
I currently have the New York classical station (WQXR) playing on one computer or another just about constantly. Though I financially support Phoenix's station, the New York one is far better.
In recent years (mostly since my divorce) I've subscribed to our local symphony, opera, and chorale. I pretty much dropped out of the opera because he was doing almost entirely new, experimental things. And then, of course, everything shut down last March.
One of my major disappointments last spring was that I had tickets to see Wagner's Ring Cycle in Chicago (Rossweisse first told me they were doing it), and of course that never happened. I'm delighted that I was able to see it in San Francisco a few years earlier.
I still buy recorded music on CD, though not quite at the same rate I used to. Major discoveries (for me) in the last few years are Mompou’s and Janacek’s solo piano music. Still acquiring choral music including lately the last few instalments of the Tallis Scholars’ now-complete set of Josquin masses.
Currently listening to Richter playing Rachmaninov.
My parents had eclectic tastes, my dad liked brass bands, and the first time I heard “The Land of the Mountain and Flood” was on a Cory Band record. My games mistress in school believed in exposing pupils to the classics, and arranged school trips to several operas at the New Theatre in Cardiff.
I also went there with my parents - I particularly remember a performance of The Pearl Fishers with Delme Bryn Jones. That’s an opera I’d dearly love to see again.
It’s coupled with a very good Berg violin concerto. (Sensibly, they put the Berg first, so you can skip over it entirely if you want.)
Sounds like some social distancing experiment gone horribly wrong...
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a concert pianist having a bad moment and starting the Grieg concerto when everyone else was playing the Schumann.
That is in fact exactly the recording that improved my appreciation of the piece last night. It's faster than many, and in fact a lot of reviews commented on it: "oh look, it does actually sound like an allegro".
Mind you, I think that he and Pappano have been the greatest musical directors at Covent Garden.
When I was really young, I loved Beethoven the very best, and bought quite few of the piano sonatas to try to learn on my old upright. My teacher wasn't a Beethoven person, and couldn't give me a lot of help, and I was way too young to attempt most of them without guidance, but it was so much fun! And the Beethoven violin concerto was just heaven! That was the reason I attempted to learn violin. I failed miserably. It scared my cats.
The scope of music in this house has increased tremendously since those long ago days. Schubert, Debussy, Mozart, Brahms...and especially Bach. Don't love everything, but playing or listening to them puts my soul back where it belongs.
Which one - Monteverdi or Gluck? We prefer Monteverdi but both are good.
Probably my very, very favourite recordings are of Casals playing the Bach Cello Suites - music and playing of the highest order. You have to put up with the deficiencies of recordings made 80+ years ago, but well worth it.
Glad we’re on the same page about that recording. It’s been a while since I’ve heard any other version, which is probably why it didn’t seem notably fast to me.* I’m a big fan of Faust as well as the pianist Alexander Melnikov who regularly performs with her.
(*it may also have something to do with the fact that one of our other versions is the Heifetz)
Monteverdi. I did wonder if I needed to clarify but then didn't because I remembered Gluck is officially Orfeo and Euridice... but it's often just called Orfeo...
Yeah. Saw the Monteverdi. Don't know it well, don't remember much of it. It really was all about seeing the theatre which is amazing.
I'm definitely a fan of Melnikov too. And the cellist Queyras whom they also both play with, and is actually responsible for one of my preferred Bach cello suites...
Faust in Beethoven probably isn't all that fast but I gather there was a slower approach for a period, and now in the 21st century folks have sped up a bit again. I've been reading reviews today of the one that I listened to yesterday - Zukerman with Barenboim - and yeah, turns out it's known for being a bit on the sleepy side, all very sweet and lyrical but zero drive. So whatever the range is for me, Zukerman/Barenboim isn't in it and Faust/Abbado was much more pleasing.
Most live performances I've been able to see out here are jazz, although we have (in other years) lively opera seasons with a number of acclaimed performers (Sibongile Khumalo, soprano Pretty Yende, tenor Nkululeko Mqobongo, baritone Njabulo Madlala). I saw a local interpretation of Bizet in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha some years ago, have a particular interest in the productions of William Kentridge: (La Boheme Abanxaxhi and Wozzeck following Berg's atonal score but set as a militarised nightmare in the First World War.
We have the Monteverdi somewhere or other, on 12" LP records rather than discs. Can't remember who the performers are.
Especially choral music, from Tallis, Byrd, Palestrina through to Eric Whitacre, via Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Mahler et al.
In my weekly Zoom choir we do a Bach chorale every week and are amazed at how
“ modern” some of his chords are.
Mrs RR and I bunkered down yesterday, it being a 'Lockdown Grey Day', to, not 'The Magic Flute' (by far and away our favourite opera) but 'South Pacific'. Turned into a bit of a sing-along. With tissues at the ready.
Today, sterner stuff; three of Bach's Christmas Oratorios. Or, blow that, and indulge myself in Bruckner's Fourth Symphony (Mrs RR: "Not again!!!".).
I do like Bruckner. He was a devotee of Wagner but I've heard it suggested that he was as much an heir of Schubert's symphonic writing. (I wouldn't be able to judge but I like Bruckner and Schubert and am lukewarm about Wagner.)
By 16 yrs old, I was saving college lunch money and escaping off to London’s South Bank on Friday or Saturday night for concerts at the Wigmore Hall or Queen Elizabeth Hall. Any spare time or money had me jumping in a train before 5pm at one end of the evening...and catching the last train home from Liverpool Street station.
A good friend introduced me to Gorecki’s ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’....... it saved a bad divorce from being a traumatic divorce.
Still easily my favourite.
Not as much into the classical period, Haydn kind of pop-musicked me out and Mozart appeals to my head but not my heart.
But Beethoven ESPECIALLY as he straddled classical and romantic periods. Romantic period composers, yes the Liszts and Brahmses and Tchaikovskys.
I have a weird kind of preference for 20th century composers. Stravinsky (on account of my ballet background), Mahler, Shostkovich, Strauss (the other one), Copland, Britten, Vaughn Williams, Holst, Gershwin and Hindemith.
Then on to the cinematic score composers like Ennio Morricone and the exuberant, over the top bombast of Hans Zimmer. But not John Williams - too derivative.
I can listen to just about anything except the twelve-tone composers. They're up there with the free-jazz artists like Sony Rollins. Intellectual virtuosos but not really "listenable".
AFF
Ever since being taken to see my brother in a school production of HMS Pinafore when I was six, I've had a major soft spot for Gilbert and Sullivan, and was in a few am-dram productions myself in my early 20s.
I was a teenager in Orkney when the St. Magnus Festival was founded by Peter Maxwell Davies and Norman Mitchell, and every June I overdosed on (and performed in) music from Tallis to contemporary. Then David introduced me to the music of composers such as Gibbons, Byrd, Howells and Vaughan Williams (his favourite composer).
I don't know whether I should be ashamed to admit that grand opera leaves me cold, but I can't help that.
Bach's harmonies are often extremely adventurous in a way that was not reached by most other composers until late in the nineteenth century. I remember from when I was studying Music 'A' Level that the Harmony textbook that we used quoted the same phrase from one of Bach's Chorale Preludes (his last, if I remember correctly) three times, each time to illustrate the use of a different very unusual chord.
His modulations (moving from one key to another) often move in unexpected directions, again in a way that is much more adventurous than many later composers. A classic example of this is in the Organ Toccata in F major (in my view the best of his Organ Toccatas), where at one point he is in a key aboout as remote from the original as it is possible to get.
Tosca was my favourite one. I didn't know anything about opera, but I would go into HMV, and they had this big book about all the recordings, and it would say which recordings were best. I would sit in HMV and read the book, and then go to the library and look for the recordings it recommended. However, my favourite Tosca was one the book was quite critical of, and I didn't like the one they recommended. I enjoyed borrowing the operas and reading the plots and the lyrics in the thick booklets the cassette sets would have. I liked Joan Sutherland a lot - the coloratura stuff (I didn't know it was called that at the time). I liked La Fille du Regiment, especially because it was in French, and so I understood some of it.
I then discovered Baroque music, because when I was doing my A levels, I was reading books on how to do well in exams, and how to boost your brain power and all, and it recommended Baroque music, so then I started exploring that. I particularly like Handel and Vivaldi.
Then, when I was at university, I got a membership to a library in London that had a big classical music section of CDs, and you paid £10 for a year membership and could borrow whichever you like, which I found quite delightful. This is when I discovered Mozart - there was a huge set of Mozart CDs, his complete works, so I would always borrow CDs from the set, because I like the idea of something being part of a set. I really liked Mozart from the start. I never got into Beethoven. I tried listening to his stuff too, because people would say Mozart and Beethoven are the two greats, and didn't like it. Maybe I would eventually like it if I kept listening.
In general, I discovered my favourite kind of orchestral music is violin and flute. I how have the NML app on my iPad, which I can access free through my public library, and I often listen to classical music on that. I am right now listening to some Baroque flute music. This app also has Sondheim music, which I love. I am not aware of his musicals being considered classical music, but it is specifically a classical music streaming app, so maybe he is sort of considered that.
Ain't that the truth.
I love Bach best (no surprises there) but will listen to almost anything but Chopin, who irritates me.
Like @Puzzler, when it comes to classical, I’m particularly fond of choral music. 2020 marks the longest I’ve gone in 56 years without singing in a choir.
This really describes me too. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven don’t do a whole lot for me, with some exceptions. I love Magic Flute. And I’ve tried, but I just seem unable to like Mendelssohn’s vocal music.
Right this moment, with Jan. 6 approaching, I’m listening to Amahl and the Night Visitors. My academic advisor in college was the second Amahl, after the first Amahl’s voice changed.
[PedantMode] Just the Vespers and not the whole of the All-Night Vigil? (The Vespers part is just numbers 1-6 of the All-Night Vigil) [/PedantMode]
The whole is a masterpiece of what is apparently termed "orchestral writing for voices". I particularly like the Great Doxology, a high spot in Mattins on Sundays and Feast Days in Orthodox services. Here Rachmaninov uses a Znamenny (medieval Russian) melody, which is itself an amazing work, building a long intricate melody using only FOUR notes. Rachmaninov passes this around the different voices, adding delicate harmonies and occasional countermelodies. Truly a master crafstman at work.
Currently where I live has a very good classical music, NPR affiliated station, so I have that on the radio very frequently throughout the day. Classical music (and jazz, I should say) are two of the big passions of my life.