I would like to start a thread, similar to Orpheus’ jazz site, for lovers of classical music. I will list some of my favorite recordings, CDs as well as LP’s. While good sound is not a prime requisite, it will be a consideration. Classical music lovers please feel free to add to my lists. Discussion of musical and recording issues will be welcome.
I’ll start with a list of CDs. Records to follow in a later post.
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique. Chesky — Royal Phil. Orch. Freccia, conductor. Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Vanguard Classics — Vienna Festival Orch. Prohaska, conductor. Prokofiev: Scythian Suite et. al. DG — Chicago Symphony Abbado, conductor. Brahms: Symphony #1. Chesky — London Symph. Orch. Horenstein, conductor. Stravinsky: L’Histoire du Soldat. HDTT — Ars Nova. Mandell, conductor. Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances. Analogue Productions. — Dallas Symph Orch. Johanos, cond. Respighi: Roman Festivals et. al. Chesky — Royal Phil. Orch. Freccia, conductor.
All of the above happen to be great sounding recordings, but, as I said, sonics is not a prerequisite.
With streaming sounding as good as it does I don’t see how the CD market is going to survive much longer.. Already Amazon has many titles only available as downloads.
A big plus 1 for Blomstedt and one of my favourite new pianists Piemontesi. I attended a live concert with him as a young BBC young musician and he played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 4 in G Major and it was wonderful for someone so young , I knew straightaway that I was listening to someone special. I am so glad he is now such an accomplished pianist.
The sound is as good or better than anything I have heard on You Tube . The strings are better than most live concerts I've been to and every thing else is superb !
Facts are facts , you want to hear a Germanic concert get a Germanic band .
Yeah, rok2, rvpiano & schubert. The Blomstedt/Staatskapelle Dresden recordings have become my automatic go-to when I sign onto Idagio for some orchestral.
Yes, when you come to the top of the mountain you don’t want to skip-rope .
This Perahia Brahms Op 79 I’m about to put on is because IMO he understands Brahms perfectly as both don’t have a phony bone in their body . There might be better takes , I don’t care , for ME this is the best .The little fills and great bass of Brahms,,,,,,,,,,
Same with say , the Beethoven 5th with.Bernstein might well be the best, I would not ague with anyone or call him anything but to ME he seems phony waving about hither and yon .
I would go to and do go to Herbert Blomstedt,, in his 90’s and still wanted world -wide . He uses his baton no more than needed and I know he is a very pious Christian . For ME he is the best !
My luck was I never had to go American High School . (no joke)
I had great luck or the misfortune, it depend of the perspective, to study Latin and Greek, English and French writing and reading for all my college years....
In sciences we studied basic but in our college it was not so worthy than learning how to read....I hated science course and particularly mathematics... Funny because i study mathematic by myself for decades beginning the year i quit college with my first chosen english book about numbers...
I guess learning to read was the goal or something fateful for me.... I go playing my all life work with this gift....
I was in ectasy after Bach discovery with Josquin Des Prez very young .. A music so spiritually high that it add something to my life forever...
he Minnesota IS the best Sibelius in the world . Of course they have the best Finnish conductor in the world .
One thing will still be here , as this is the ground zero for Choral Music. As it is also ground zero for the Lutheran brand of Christianity , count on it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Skrowaczewski was the only great conductor the Minnesota orch ever had on the podium as far as recordings. I know the finnish conductor you are refering to . His Sibelius is the very worst I ever heard. The only Sibelius I have left in my collection are a few of his tone poems and his great Kullervo sym His syms, after 5 full sets, are now long gone.
So Minnesota , LutheranISM is popular there. I too you up on that and googled *Lutheran churches Minnieapolis** and what do you know,,, There are dozens if not at least 100 Lutheran hits. This is good to know, as a student of religious studies/mediveal, etc. Luther was a rascal, and thats being nice. I can not say what i really think about that guy on a public forum. And we have ostenisible christian groups employing this guys name. . My mother was german from Ohio, I think there are lots of germans up there in MN. WOW those germans, I guess they choose not to read what Jung has to say about them. Modern man, not much different from medieval man.
History of music is like history of philosophy and like any other cultural histories a reflection about consciousness and his own evolution and history...
Then the history of music like other histories mirror the heart and souls of the times we lives through, nothing less and nothing more.....
Then the painting, the music and all other traditional esthetical practice became nowadays more "technical reflections" of the overpowrering and idolatry of technology ...
Now, where on the world scene transhumanism, define, resume and incarnate the tragedy of our times; Art itself became a dying "human" activity which has been replaced by a more powerful craft, soon itself to be play by a Non-Human intelligence....
Human art is merely becoming the dust beside the emerging new magical craft.....
When all this is said.....
I strongly oppose to someone who would claim that ALL contemporary artists are degenerate, or meaningless...
Even in our epoch there is giants in art....But they are buried under the mass of con-artists or by the mass of good artisans who seek the hype and the idols of our times.....These great contemporary artists are not well known save very few of them and for very few "amateurs"...
A living interval of times is an Aeon...Each Aeon is able to recognize only what is dear to his heart, like all living entities....Our Aeon promote what is in his heart: the idolatry of technology and his "magical" craft....
jim204674 posts10-08-2021 8:40amI think Western Classical music is falling in on itself and being dumbed down day by day. Every time I hear New Music I despair, Discordant, single lines with no harmony attached, written from a keyboard attached to a computer and then it goes through the Sibelius program to sort out themes and harmony then. The whole thing is bereft of any soul and then has to be played by orchestras who hate every note but who won't get funding if they don't play it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hard for me to follow up on this bullseye comment.
It never occured to me, to investigate other 21st C composers, , not after my discovery of Pettersson, Schnittke, Elliott Carter and last but not least Hans Henze.
What all began with Correli, Vivaldi, Bach , has, like all good and great things, now have come to its finale. What a genre of muisc. From Bach to Mozart (can I skip over my least fav composer Beethoven, when in fact I HATE all his **music * with a passion,,) Then on to Puccini, Wagner, Debussy many others, and the finale to this magnificient art form, with the 4 previous mentioned composers. But I must say, what a finale, what a fireworks show at the end. If Correli , Vivaldi and Bach could could hear what musical works, that Schnittke, Pettersson, Henze and Carter has accomplished, they would be in shock of when they began and to where these 4 giants have ended this art form.
Modern day composers, what is their inspiration?? This i would have to know. Undoubtable , what they find as motivations to score, is nothing I am in the least bit interested. So like yeah, outside those 4 finalers of the tradition, , I have no interest in anything *modern*. No thanks.
Gabetta is a first class cellist if a little wayward, I heard her in a Proms about 3 years ago and thoroughly enjoyed her so I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
@schubert Hi Len, I've just this minute logged on and found your posts. I promise to check tomorrow and get back to you as it's nearly time for bed over here . I love the Haydn C Major concerto, one of the nicest ever written and for me definitely up there with the Dvorak so I'm going to look forward to that. At the moment I am winding down with Arrau playing Schumann's Etude Symphoniques and enjoying every minute of it ( always an under current and darkness in Schumann ). Oidhche mhath Jim.
Perhaps you might like this 204, she about blew me off my chair !
Sol Gabetta, in the last part of the Saint-Saens Cello # 2 , both it and her seem little known in US .
This little outing won her the Opus Klassic ,the leading award in Germany for Classical Music . Hard to believe a rather slim women can play like a powerhouse !
Just listening to Daniil Triffonov's new Bach recording on Qobuz , my his fingers can fly. It's very impressive and thought provoking, but doesn't plumb the depths if you know what i mean . That said it's very enjoyable.
Yes I also love the Prazak Quartet in the Haydn Quartets. Wonderful interpretations and a salutary lesson in how a recording should be made. I think it is one of the cleanest recordings I have listened to in a long while.
@Schubert Yes Len that was a lovely rendition by that young man. your comment on one of the hardest instruments reminds me of a comment the French Horn virtuoso Denis Brain once made. He said that playing the horn was like driving a truck down a frosty hill with no brakes !!!
Ervin Nyiregyházi is one of my piano god....I dont have many....
He says " i dont mind really about the notes because what matters really is not there"...
Not the usual humility of an interpret to a composer... 😁😊
But the master of Ervin Nyiregyházi, Liszt, would have understood very well himself this iconoclastic way of playing....Our pianist is made of the same cloth that these notoriously "possessed" artists, Listz, Paganini or Scriabin....
I never listen to a more beautiful rendition of Liszt.....It is a heartfelt telluric playing where sophistication is only a memory not the center of the day....
With him we hear how a melody could be a spoken language....
Music dont accompany the written song here, music IS the original spoken word itself out of any language......
Muti is a wonderful musician. I heard him twice in recent years live at Carnegie Hall with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and both concerts were remarkable. On record, his Prokofiev is especially terrific.
I just discovered on Qobuz a recent release of a monumental performance of Verdi’s Requiem conducted by Ricardo Muti, with Jesse Norman and Jose Carreras among the soloists.
Len I am sorry to say it is a very different matter over in Scotland.We have very good conductors like Dausgard and Sondergard but they are held to task by rules from left wing gits with not one ounce of musical sense to them. Jim.
I live in a large city with two world-class orchestras and thousands of music students , well worth hearing . And several superb halls .
With the concerts of the students , which I love, audience is other students, family and about ten old people like myself .
In the two world-class the audience is 90% over 70 . Now with 4 million people you can pack the 1,500 hall and 2,500 hall but 10 years from now , you guess .
I must say that the Saint Paul CO and the Minnesota Orchestra play only the best . SPCO is a good a Mozart band as any . The Minnesota IS the best Sibelius in the world . Of course they have the best Finnish conductor in the world .
One thing will still be here , as this is the ground zero for Choral Music. As it is also ground zero for the Lutheran brand of Christianity , count on it .
I think Western Classical music is falling in on itself and being dumbed down day by day. Every time I hear New Music I despair, Discordant, single lines with no harmony attached, written from a keyboard attached to a computer and then it goes through the Sibelius program to sort out themes and harmony then. The whole thing is bereft of any soul and then has to be played by orchestras who hate every note but who won't get funding if they don't play it. I happen to go to RSNO concerts and some of the BBC Orchestras in Glasgow and they always have to play this garbage at the start of these concerts. When they are finished and the orchestra stands to accept the applause !! there is a mass invasion of people coming to take their seats much to the amusement of the orchestra. I may upset some people now so if you are easily offended please don't read any further. The BBC now have an unwritten law that new music gets played more frequently written by women and black people and all the better if it's both. I have never heard so much drivel in all my life , a lot of these people write computer games music. It shows how clever they are if they can get Sibelius to write it the more enharmonically the better. After it gets an airing on the BBC then an ex BBC newsreader expounds it on air saying how virtuosic and clever it was, clowns wouldn't know good music if it jumped up and bit them on the backside. I really am depressed about the state of classical music these days. I am glad I am the age I am as I won't have to see the eventual disintegration of it. Jim.
Twoleftears, thank you for linking to the Spectator piece by Pace.
While it's an overstatement to say that "the culture wars are killing Western classical music," as the Spectator article's heading proclaims, that's not really what this opinion piece says. The thesis is that the culture wars are endangering academic musicology, and that will have harmful effects on Western music itself.
The Spectator piece is interesting and insightful. But even the actual thesis of the piece is somewhat overstated. Western classical music will likely survive even if academic musicology is further marginalized.
Classical music survives because it's played, and listened to attentively, not because it is written about in journals.
The greatest composers wrote music that expresses, more profoundly than any other art can, what it means to be a human being. And now, though mass media and the Internet, the music is accessibly to vast numbers of people like never before in history. They can find it, hear it, and have it change their lives.
First-rate composers still can flourish, and produce first-rate music in the Western classical tradition. Think of Philip Glass, John Adams, and Thomas Ades.
There are reasons to not be so pessimistic about the future of Western classical music.
I'm currently being bowled over by an Idagio stream of Mozart's Symphony #40. Played by the Ensemble Rezonanz. Conducted by Riccardo Minasi. Far from polite, it's a compelling, full-on romantic fireball rendition we might have heard in the days of Beethoven or Mendelssohn. Sound quality is just as excellent.
Thanks , 204 ! ,It looks better in life and there are hundreds of lakes , all beautiful . They are the most ancient mountains on the Planet , thousands of miles higher than ANY others on the world at present .
There is a hiking trail of 125 miles cut in a 45 % manner south to north , I have hiked it over 50 times , My doc says she has never seen such rock-hard legs in a man my age in her 30 years on the job .
I didn't tell her the Adirondacks are , according to many American Native tribes , the power center of the earth .
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