Classical Music for Aficionados

Since today is Lenny Bernstein's 100th Birthday, I'm listening to his  Mahler 2nd Symphony

schubert

My wife was a MacKinnon, and collected pipe and drum CDs, plus solitary piper CDs for years. I still play them in her memory. 

George

jim204

Because she was a MacKinnon, our house whisky was Talisker. 

Go Figure!

I didn't appreciate Mahler until listening to stereo LPs.  

I'm new to this group, and probably will make a fool of myself. And, horror upon horrors, I have no particular preference for composers. I was taught  music should be judged on its own, and not by who wrote it. Performance of a piece is another matter. 
I'm an Old Fud, whose introduction to classical music was listening to Enrico Caruso on 78 rpm Victor Red  Seals, played on a wind-up Victrola using cactus needles - -  and whose first opera was Carmen, in the Met,  with Risa Stevens.  

Guess I'm ready to make a fool of myself.
Trying to cull my classical CD collection has been a chore. Over the past several decades, my wife and I managed to acquire multiple performances of things we liked - - symphonies, operas, concertos, chorales, etc. 

Just now, I've been selecting what to keep of the various Verdi Requiem recordings, and what to pass on to our community library. 

We had managed to collect performances by Karajan, Solti, Toscanini, Reiner, Shaw, Giulini and Barenboim.  Of these, I narrowed it down to the Shaw (Atlanta),  Reiner,  Giulini (Berlin) and Barenboim (La Scala), each for a different reason as clearly, each had a  different approach  to the Requiem.

Shaw's is an "In Your Face!" rendition, with both the chorus and soloists clearly recorded above the orchestra.  Reiner's opening is inordinately slow, with the chorus barely discernible above the orchestra. Giulini's latest, a 1989 recording in Berlin, shows how his interpretation has changed over almost 60 years since his first in 1960. Finally, Barenboim's current 2012 recording is the only one made with a live audience. 

Both Karajan and Barenboim recorded in La Scala,  with the La Scala Orchestra and Chorus; however, Karajan's was all about Karajan, and the absence of a live audience permitted pauses in recording and patching recorded segments into the final product.   To satisfy my curiosity, I purchased the DVDs for both the Karajan and Barenboim performances. IMO, no contest. For me, Barenboim.s was the better meld of Soloists, Orchestra, Chorus, Conductor and Venue. 

Next CD-winnowing project: Go through the Puccini and Verdi operas. My mother used to tell me: "Verdi wrote for the mind, while Puccini wrote from the heart." I'm going to assess those operas with that as a judgement criterion.

Thanks for reading this far

George