Opera Nut

Hawkinfan, I have PLAYED most of the symphonic rep myself. I played first fiddle for years in numerous college & community orchestras.

I am also a pianist (my first instrument and my first love) and can see visually what a lot of things are written on the page as a piano piece.

I have played very little chamber music but it is demanding and intimate--I really enjoy doing it. So much harder and more rewarding than orchestral playing which turns into mass sawing so often.

I still am sick of the Fifth. From playing it.

Berlioz is indisputably quite cool. The Symphonie Fantastique -- nuff said. Also the Requiem is quite theatrical and nifty.

Wynton Marsalis (who plays classical and jazz trumpet both) said "Classical composers all sound like each other -- except for Berlioz".

I wouldn't go that far, but he has a good point. Berlioz said in his book of Letters that if all his pieces were consigned to the fire, that the one he would beg to be spared, as his masterpiece, is the Requiem mass.

The Late Beethoven Quartets are truly weird, close to impossible to play, and brilliantly ahead of their time.

Including the Grosse Fuge.
I once heard a well known quartet play the last Beethoven quartet (opus #s escape me) and THEN played the Grosse Fuge which substitutes. That was a real physical workout!!

Richard Strauss is quite imaginative. He slides all over place tonally. I played Also Sprach Zathustra in High School at music camp and it is complex as hell and a bitch to play. But it sounds neat, even tho it was overused for years after 2001:A Space Odyssey came out.

I saw Electra and thought it was horrible. I thought they were a bunch of screaming neurotic harpies.

I saw Ariadne auf Naxos and liked a lot of it, especially the mezzo part of the Composer.

I haven't seen Salome yet, but I want to. Bonus part is the libretto by Oscar Wilde. As my singing teacher used to say, some of those sopranos are so big that seven veils just won't do -- ten or fifteen might!! LOL!!

I've heard of Stockhausen. I have played one Bartok piece in college, and that was the ballet suite The Miraculous Mandarin. Damned weird stuff. I can't handle Bartok chamber music.

Mozart operas are wonderful, after you've digested the symphonies. The operas are light and pleasant, exact opposite of Wagner's ponderousness.

My fave opera in the whole entire world is DON GIOVANNI. Magic Flute and Marriage of Figaro are up there too. mozart was a genius at psychological insight and characterization. But then he was just an enlightened avatar guy anyway.

Hardest thing I've ever played that gave me lots of enjoyment was the Organ Symphony (#3) of Saint Saens. We did it in a church with a big ass pipe organ, so the audience would be blasted awake at the organ entrance.

Three Places in New England gave me a headache to play. It was supposed to be two diff marching bands coming toward a town circle up the spokes of a wheel type streets, but it doesn't work when the orchestra is not separated. It just sounds messy.


Playing Bach on the fiddle and Chopin on the piano have rocked my world for decades. you would laugh at my original Chopin waltz book that I loved to death, taped back together, and finally had to buy a new copy...with original study dates on them starting in 1965 through 1970.

Wyrdsmyth

Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven are clearly the Big Three.

Then there are a bunch of others, like Chopin, Vivaldi, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Dvorak and Schubert. Then there is Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, Shumann, and Liszt. But in this tier, it is often in dispute how they rank.

I was delighted to see someone mention Glazunov. That is a lesser composer I love as well. Others I really like are Shostakovich, Sibelius, Elgar, Copland, Holst, and Paganini. But it is all really a matter of taste and what one likes. Not all of my favorite or most listened-to composers are considered the "titans" of classical music. But so what? I think the important thing is to be open to new music and explore the whole field as much as one can.

hezekiah jones

Originally posted by Opera Nut
I once heard a well known quartet play the last Beethoven quartet (opus #s escape me) ...

135 in F, October 1826.

Corgan Sow

Uh, no I didn't mean that. Bruckner's orchestration was inspired by Wagner's, especially heavy use of brass (four tubas, anyone?). In compariosn, Brahms had his inspirations from Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn at least. He doesn't break new grounds like Mahler although certainly I agree with you on your points regarding Brahms' symphonies.

I also forgot Liszt was the one who started tone poems which inspired Berlioz, Wagner and R.Strauss to do their groundbreaking compositions. I also thought Berlioz was a one-hit wonder composer (the Symphonie Fantastique) until I hear his overtures. Brilliant stuff.

Oh, and OperaNut, have you heard of Mahler's Eight? I just heard the Sir Colin Davis and the Bavarian Radio version and I can tell you the vocals blow the fuck all the other opera and oratorio records. But, not the composition itself, you should know what i mean since it involves 800 choir singers at least.

Adrammalech

I have been a classical music fan since the first grade, and oddly enough have never picked up an intrument. I barely know what a chord is nor do I know of who inspired who. My main criteria for music is what I call the "tingle effect" it mostly occurs in the concert halls and even truely great pieces can ilicit it while being played in a car stereo. The tingle effect occurs when a piece of music makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. It could be during a very grand passage or a very simple and beautiful one. The point is, when it happens, you know its good.

Symphony
Mahler, Symphony 1 "Titan"

Piano concerto:
Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto

Piano:
Erik Satie, pretty much all of it

Modern:
Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi

Violin:
Concerto for violin, strings and continuo in a minor, JS Bach

Organ:
Pascaglia and Fugue, JS Bach

Voice Male:
Una furtiva lagrima, Donizetti

Voice Female:
Nulla in mundo pax sincera, Vivaldi


And the single greatest piece of all time, unchallenged by all it succeeded and all that have come since:

Requiem in D minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Opera Nut

A big AMEN from the Atheist Amen Corner on the Mozart Requiem!!

Elora

LOVE the Requiem! Played it in high school with the choir and just shivered every time we got to Dies Irae.

In general I dislike Baroque music, probably because it's extremely aggravating to play after a while. Vivaldi in particular gives me phantom shoulder cramps now after the numerous times I suffered through practice. I'm basically a sucker for huge, dramatic orchestral themes and melodies, or soft, tragic themes, so I like Romantic and Classic-era stuff.

Some favorites of mine are Dvorak (New World Symphony and Serenades), Mussorgsky (Pictures at an Exhibition), Copland and Stravinsky. I also love the St. Peter's Suite, though I can't remember the composer.

Hawkingfan

Nice to meet you, Opera Nut. I have lived all over the United States and even lived in the Houston area for awhile. Maybe I have actually seen you play. They have a nice little community orchestra there called the Houston Symphony North that I saw play on several occasions. Did you play there?
Here in LA we have the most community orchestras I've ever seen. It's like there's one on every corner. The Beverly Hills Orchestra, Santa Monica, San Fernando Valley, on and on... And the quality is very good. A lot of the players work in the film industry.
True (I don't know about calling them "weird" but I guess you could). Those quartets are definitely some of the most important seminal works in all of music. They are extremely hard to analyze as well. Some of them have ambiguous forms. You can look at some as a sonata, but then certain questions arise and you'd have to look at it as something else, but then questions come up again in other places and it makes you change the analysis to a fantasy or something else. There's one that I remember analyzing, and you could look at the second A of an ABA first theme in sonata as the A of the second theme in an ABA! You could have debates on if certain notes and figures are true melodies or not, and that debate determines what the overall form will be. But the answers are not definite, so all you can do is shrug your shoulders and take an aspirin.
My favorite Strauss piece is the Alpine Symphony. My favorite "atonal" thing he ever did was in Don Quixote where he was imitating sheep with stopped horn that is completely out of harmony with what the rest of the orchestra is doing. It really sounds like he jumped ahead sixty years or so.
Oh, yes. The Miraculous Mandarin is wonderful. It's a piece that is gaining more ground as the years go by. I think it will one day be up there with his other orchestral works (I think it's his best orchestral piece) and will even be up there with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
Uh-oh. I LOVE his chamber music. Is there a better violin and piano sonata written in the twentieth century? I don't think so. Or more importantly, is there a better SOLO VIOLIN SONATA written in the twentieth century? I say NO WAY!!! In fact, when someone tells me they play violin and tell me how good they are, I ask "Can you play the Bartok?" (referring to the solo sonata).

And there definitely, *definitely* is not a better String Quartet written by a twentieth century composer as Bartok's Fourth. That piece you can definitely use the term "rock out". I literally sometimes head-bang to it (the last movement)--ha ha! Do you have the Emerson String Quartet recording of all 6 quartets? If not, go buy it ASAP! Crank the volume baby!
The third one also "rocks". It's like Metallica on a classical kick.
I'd say no one comes close to his quartets. Janacek, Shostakovitch, and Carter have some good ones too though.
That one is good. Have you ever heard or played the Poulenc Organ Concerto? That is one of my favorite relatively modern organ works.
I agree. I think Ives is over-rated anyway. The ideas are okay, but I always ask "So what?" when I hear his music and hear someone speak about his ideas. His second symphony is alright. What is the big deal about the layerings of lame-ass American "folk" music? I'd much rather listen to Elliot Carter. His music may be Ivesian, but he is taking it to another level and it doesn't have that stupid "hokeyness" to it.