Classical Music anyone?

[BarbaraGordon]

Anybody else ever listen to any classical music?

Favorite composer or piece?

I'll take Tchaikovsky.
Shostakovich and Gershwin as runners-up, I think.

We were sort of hoping our son would play the cello but he wants to play the drums.
:o


An album I highly recommend (which, actually, is not Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, or Gershwin) is Vivaldi's Cello

[creekster]

I liked Tchakovsky a lot when I was younger, but have gravitated to Beethoven more over time among the romantic era composers.

On balance, however, Bach is the master for me. His work transcends conscious perception and connects with something spiritual and mysrtical that is very difficult to articulate.

The other night we went to the SF symphony to hear a program of all Mozart. This was a family oriented production (although unlike us, very few people acutally brought childern, to my surprise; must be a San Francisco thing). A feature of this concert series is that the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, talks about each piece beofer it is played in an informal but informative way. At one point he told this very long, involved joke, which was sort of amusing. But the part that I liked was one of the set-up lines. In the joke a musician dies and gets to heaven where he meets St. Peter. He asks St. Peter how all the great compsoers are doing in Heaven. St. Peter says they are doing very well. As an example, He says that Bach is living with his two wives and all his children and that he has taken to compsing 1000 voice fugues. St. Peter then comments that no one else really understands them but God seems to enjoy them quite a bit. The joke goes on to a punchline about Mozart having weekend passes to hell. Not a great joke, but I thouhgt it amusing and insightful that Bach was considered a composer of such quality and complexity that the comment that he might write music that only God would understand and enjoy could bne used as a premise for a joke among serious musicians. Very appropriate from my point of view.

[BarbaraGordon]

Originally Posted by creekster

The other night we went to the SF symphony to hear a program of all Mozart. This was a family oriented production (although unlike us, very few people acutally brought childern, to my surprise; must be a San Francisco thing).

I'm officially jealous. They broadcast the San Francisco Symphony out here and it's clearly a world-class group. And I love Tilson-Thomas. All we have is the Oklahoma City Philharmonic which is, well, um...

On the other hand, we have lots of kids at the family concerts!

I'll always be a fan of the Romantic era. But my favorite Bach is probably Brandenburg...

[FarrahWaters]

Somehow, I never have appreciated Mozart very much. Learning the piano sonatas as a kid, I found it a lot of technical fluff. He does write some gorgeous melodies though.

There a lot of pieces that I love. These are the ones that I keep coming back to.
Bach- Goldberg Variations (love the way these evolve from a simple Aria that was originally a teaching piece.) Any of the unaccompained violin or cello partitias. Clean lines, sophisticated form and content, meditatively beautiful.

Beethoven- any of the piano sonatas, esp. the later ones. Also, the Grosse Fugue (string quartet)- talk about hearing Beethoven's inner demons in this one.

Chopin- (esp. the Ballades) the most pianistically friendly composer, I haven't met a pianist who doesn't love to play Chopin.

some Rachmaninoff preludes- though I find him to get a little bombastic sometimes.

love the harmonies in Debussy and Ravel

love the rhythmic energy in Ginastera

[BarbaraGordon]

Originally Posted by FarrahWaters

Somehow, I never have appreciated Mozart very much. Learning the piano sonatas as a kid, I found it a lot of technical fluff.

Your comment reminds me of the scene in Amadeus where Mozart debuts his opera for his patron:

Emperor Joseph II says, "there are simply too many notes...just cut a few."

And Mozart goes half-postal and replies, "which few did you have in mind?"

Emperor's complaint is really funny, but so true...



As far as technical work goes, I love to see anybody tackle the Paganini violin concerti. It's not even like they're pleasant to listen to... it's just unfathomable to me that anybody can play that many notes at the same time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZAdgyTVMHc

[creekster]

Originally Posted by Lisa.Kinzer

Your comment reminds me of the scene in Amadeus where Mozart debuts his opera for his patron:

Emperor Joseph II says, "there are simply too many notes...just cut a few."

And Mozart goes half-postal and replies, "which few did you have in mind?"

Emperor's complaint is really funny, but so true...

Hey now, I am a big fan of Mozart. Which few notes, indeed? At the time and place Mozart was composing most or all of his contemporaries were engaged in wirting works full of cliches such as scale runs to a chrod or arpeggios repeated in different steps, etc. The audience expected, ney, demanded, these types of cliches in their music. THe genius of mozart lies, among other places, in the fact that he could deliver the expected cliches in an unsrupassed artisitc package.

Also, I think one has to put his light opera and popular work (for example the SF Symphony chorus perfromed a canon that was called something like "You Assinine Martin" which was full of very explicit scatological jokes) in a separate category from his concertos , etc., which are all in a different catefogry from his serious opera and liturgical works. His unfinished Requiem Mass is sublimely beautiful and has not one note too many. Similarly, Don Giovanni is also superb and not unduly technical or contrived.

Don't forget, Mozart was a young man, leaving this incredible ouevre without ever reaching the age of 40. Heck, I didn't even quit using 'pull my finger' jokes with my kids until I was older htan that, so who knows what he might have accomplished had he been pernmitted to linger longer in this life?

Sometimes listening to Mozart I get the feeling that he worte some of the things he did becasue he could. No other reason, just becasue he could and no one else could and it was fun and he would have been bored otherwise. He was, musically, that far beyond most everyone else.

[BarbaraGordon]

Mozart's great.

Nobody's going to try to argue with you about his genius, his compositions, or his body of work as a whole.

And obviously, technical fluff does not apply to all his work, as you delineated.

I don't know if you ever played any instruments, but FarrahWaters and I were (I think) speaking from experience as students...

For me, I would get to these passages and there are so many notes, arpeggios, embellishments, that it felt like it was detracting from the piece, the melody, the phrasing.

Sometimes I wonder if, similar to what you said, he was bored and sort of playing jokes on the rest of us...just to keep himself interested.

[creekster]

Originally Posted by Lisa.Kinzer

Mozart's great.

Nobody's going to try to argue with you about his genius, his compositions, or his body of work as a whole.

And obviously, technical fluff does not apply to all his work, as you delineated.

I don't know if you ever played any instruments, but FarrahWaters and I were (I think) speaking from experience as students...

For me, I would get to these passages and there are so many notes, arpeggios, embellishments, that it felt like it was detracting from the piece, the melody, the phrasing.

Sometimes I wonder if, similar to what you said, he was bored and sort of playing jokes on the rest of us...just to keep himself interested.

Oh sure, now you throw my lack of real keyboard skills in my face. Just joking.

I play a little keyboards but I could never manage anyhting by Mozart. My son, however, is a reasonably talented pianist and has studied numerous pieces by Mozart and CHopin and Rachmaninoff, etc. I rarely tired of hearing Mozart while he was working on them, but sometimes Rachmaninoff got a little tedious, to be honest.

I don't think he was playing jokes on us, I think he was keeping himself happy; we were incidental. I have noticed that most kids, especially boys, that study the paino somewhat seriously love to play the fast stuff. The faster the better. It is a form of youthful exuberance. I think Mozart may have been like that. His music fairly screams youthful exuberance. I will certainly not tell you your opinion is incorrect, but only that I don't share it with respect to the large majority of Mozart's music.

[SteelBlue]

I like Handel and Vivaldi a lot.

What about opera? I've always loved Orff's "Carmina Burana". I may be Orff's only fan. Everyone else I mention it to says "ewww, you mean that song from the exorcist?"

[BarbaraGordon]

Originally Posted by SteelBlue

I like Handel and Vivaldi a lot.

What about opera? I've always loved Orff's "Carmina Burana". I may be Orff's only fan. Everyone else I mention it to says "ewww, you mean that song from the exorcist?"

Carmina Burana rocks.

Especially if you translate the Latin. It sounds all spiritual but really it's about beer and women.

Oh, and if you like Vivaldi, you HAVE to have Vivaldi's Cello CD. Absolutely stunning.