Classical Music for Aficionados

Oh Len I'm so glad you are getting through it. My thoughts are with you my friend. Take care , Jim.

Thank you and do the same ,jim.

rv , it was much easier before 11

It  is becoming a hell where all must lick the big shoes of the mighty.

Tried over 9o minutes for naught ,

What a great thread and so many great pieces.

I started listening to classical seriously when I was in Jr High and was at a JC, somewhere in PA where I heard a quartet playing Pachabel I believe. It was great so when I returned home I found a radio station that was a Classical Station called KkHi in SF. They played Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi and Tchaikovsky, Handel and Grieg and Debussy. So that started me on the journey of my addiction to home audio equipment and classical music. 
my favorite symphony 

So getting to favorite classical pieces, I lean more towards the Baroque Composers, the transition Classical period from Baroque and handful of Romantic period and the Russian composer onslaught of the 19th Century and I do like 20th century American Composers.

The labels or orchestras I buy are as follows in no particular order-

• Sir Neville Mariner and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (Murat Perahia Bach Keyboard Concerto’s No 1, No. 2 and No. 3

Philips digital recording of Mozart Requiem 

Deutche Grammephon Digital Recording of various composers (Albion’s Adagio Pachebel Canon Berliner Philharmonic with Herbert con Karajan 

Telarc produced some good ones-Handel Water Music

These are just a handful of the awesome world of Instrmental Symphony, Orchestratrated and Quartet as well as Opera music to enjoy. 
 

It is my favorite version among other great one, like the Bohm one, but this Hogwood interpretion with a children voice chorus is an interpration that did never sound like a mass but like a drama, a spiritual opera, expressing the fear of death, the acceptance of death and the desire for death like in a children heart afraid and at the same time nostalgically aspiring to the promising adventure, all that make this version unique and to be frank the best for me in spite of any other possible and rightful criticism someone could make...No interpretation is perfect....But this one catch the universal essence of this ARCHETYPICAL work about death...

Contrary to the magnificent Bohm version that sound like a magnificent mass for example, the Hogwood version sound like a spiritual opera not a mass at all.... How deep and how wise was this choice of children voices and of the pulsating rythm and tempo to illustrate Mozart beating heart at the time of his own death...Thanks Christopher Hogwood...

This is the more universal Requiem ever written because of this PRIMEVAL understanding of death for the children heart in each of us, like the swift coming of the great fearsome riper and like the awaiting of our loving mother after our own death at the same time ....And listening to this we are all children again facing death....

And listen the solists they are singing like in an opera they dont pray, they tell a spiritual intimate and at the same time universal story.... The prayer is not in the parts of this " requiem mass" but you can listen to this prayer in the irresistible dancing beating pulsating heart of the composer himself writing all the voices like if each one of them was himself speaking....Incredible feat....The more efficient and powerful requiem ever written....Who will dare to write a requiem after that, it will be difficult to wrote another concerto called the "Four seasons" after Vivaldi, or another work called the Well tempered Klavier or the Art of the fugue after Bach ...

This Requiem is magical especially in this interpretation....

When in my early twenties I literally wore out the grooves of three or four vinyl records of the Mozart Requiem playing it every day.

To me the greatest of all requiems and some of the greatest music ever written.