Classical Music for Aficionados

Thanks,204 .

I'll see if I can buy one .

The D  Chaconne is one of the Masters  best !

I have just came upon Leonidas Kavakos new recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin on Idagio and am very impressed by them. I find him to have a totally original approach to them in that he uses decorations in the repeats which no other present day soloists do according to the ones I have heard in the last few years. His intonation is perfect with no portamentos to slide up to the correct note. I find his violin tone to be not so penetrating and sterile as a few I could mention. He starts of with the E major Partita and ends with the D minor partita so he knows how to get the ball rolling and end on a high. His rendition of the great Chaconne in D Minor is an awesome piece of recording a violin to give it's utmost tone and purity. If you are going to try any of them do watch the volume control as Sony's recording misses nothing. 

@rvpiano Thank you

@edcyn

I could only find it on EMI-Warner. That might also account for the unexpectedly fine SQ. IIRC Muti has been under contract to them for most of his career.

Fenmoore,

Try Presto Classical.

Also Amazon

What on-line shops do you recommend for classical albums? The few places I have been using tend to favor jazz and rock. Very little classical choices.

Thanks.

Schubert Symphony No. 8 (9) in C major. "The Great." Ricardo Muti and the Vienna Phil. Currently listening to it on Idagio. One of the sweetest, most spacious DG orchestral recordings I’ve heard. Singing. Beautifully paced.

Saša Večtomov

I heard his cello playing with Ivan Moravec's piano, Ravel's Habanera.  Incredibly beautiful.

He was Czech, studied in Moscow, contemporary with Rostropovich.

Hard to find any actual recordings, but there is plenty on YouTube.

Perhaps the best is with his brother on guitar.

I might have already mentioned this work somewhere in this thread, but try Symphony No. 1 by Florence Price. Available on Idagio in a surprisingly good-sounding recording on DGG. She's an African-American composer who worked in the early 20th Century. The symphony is filled with great tunes and is constructed with eminent skill and heart. Think of Dvorak...

ASK and Be Heard !

I’ve never heard Ian Bruce, sounds VERY much the man for the job!

Thank,Jim.

The German " I had a Kameraden " is sung by soldiers in many Armies .

USA being one. Canada will stay with Scotia Forever .

I’d like to hear the Burn’s "Soldier Returm""’ sung . No luck

This lament was penned after the the battle of Flodden in 1513 when King James the Fourth and nearly all the Scottish nobility were wiped out.

This Scottish lament was played for the Duke of Edinburg as he was laid to rest .

Came to me, this is also played as every Canadian Soldier , Sailor and Airman

, no matter where they have Fallen., The lament is played by a lone piper as six men bring the dead to the tarmac from the belly of an RCAF plane .

.

I was a bit sad for the Duke but very few had a life like he.

Those young Canadians had so very little.

That’s to cry for .  

Last week we did not praise to the sky the birthday of Mozart, a despicable act.

I most give one of Schubert’s greatest pieces a rendition on his 225th this Monday.

Praise be to him from Brahms "He is the greatest of us all " !

They sleep next to next for infinity in the Wein City Ground .

Andras Schiff has a very well respected Brahms twin piano concertos that I can really relate to. I think he plays a nearly period Bosendorfer but to hear it you wouldn't know it.

This particular flabbergasting and imperative supreme interpretation save me from my Brahms obsession about my favorite piano concerto the second one...

Played like this Beethoven shine like  perhaps never before and like rarely  after....The pianist is mature and stupendous by his sense of hues and power ... At the level of the few giants of the piano...

Leibniz improved the computing machine created by Pascal and designed his own one and created the calculus after reading Pascal..Leibniz was very admirative of Pascal genius ...

What is stunning is less the I.Q. of Pascal than his very mature deep thinking in all matter, spirituality included... Even Kafka or Borges could have learned from Pascal imagination of the infinites manifested in every day life mysteries....

Brahms is so great musician and serious spirit i am not surprized that he appeciated Pascal....His creation for chorus are my favorite works...And i am in love with Zymerman/Bernstein concerto number 2 for piano....Because of Zymerman subtle magical  touch more than for  Bernstein  whom is great here for sure...

This work for me embodied late popular 19 century "salon" romanticism...Just a so beautiful concerto that make shadow on  many others  ...Some work are so perfect that listening anything  ressembling them after them is  very difficult...I never was able to replace this concerto by anything else in my heart....

It's midnight and  I'm tried  but i think I read Bach had fantastic math power in his head hence counter-point etc

also  Think that Brahms read Pascal - he did have an IQ  off the chart

Oh some drunk or drugy might forget but if you read Pascal  your' likely smart

    enough to remember

Viva La Quebec !

I rarely encounter a man so mature and deep in all fields of human interest than Pascal...

Reading him is a stunning awakening on all scale...And he was the greatest prose french writer , he transform french prose in an "art of the fugue"...

There is a deep link between Bach music and Pascal thinking...Even if more than 20 years separate the death of one and the birth of the other...

The audible presence of God in the music of Bach answer to the more than probable existence of the Designer in his famous mathematical "wager" and the inner heart consuming fire of love in man....

The wager idea was never understood clearly by most thinkers....Most said that this was a very simplistic argument about God existence...

But it was never intended to be an argument, but a little spark of fire able to ignite the whole world... Why?

Because if someone is able to think about the infinite only one time he will never be able to erase the idea or this experience after it was born in him...

The wager is the wood, and the stones which rubbed with one another will ignite a fire...it is more potent than the St Anselm ontological argument, because it is an appeal to an existential gesture of the thinking...Not only a logical argument....

If you create the idea of infinity one time in your imagination, going back before this moment will become for ever impossible...

Like in the history of mathematic the creation by Cantor of the infinite actualities...

I am surprized that there is no musical work i know of dedicated to Pascal....

It’s more your Glory.

I find among very intelligent people I know they use spiritual all the time.

Most are people who can not understand why if there is a God why he allows

the horrows of our world .I have to turn my head when I see a 3 yr child weighs

ten pounds and a 13 year old girl is less than four 4 ,ft tall on a "Save the Child",,which is my chief fund ,, ad on TV .

Or why is my son or my mother or my wife have, cancer .

And a thousand other things. I don’t have the answer.

All I can think of , is mankind has proved there is infinity and if there is a God

all the Sorrows of this earth are less than the blink of his eye .

And there is always Pascal.

I think you are right for Madama Butterfly...

Thank  you to understand my perspective...

I like to discuss ... It is my Achiles heel....

My version for what you say, and rightly so, is simple , Prayer .

God is not looking for a spiritual opera.

P.S .

Madama Butterfly is a spiritual opera , very much so.

Mozart was like us, ordinary human, thinking about death with fear and hope at the same time...I dont think that we must fear death, i think the the animal in us fear death...And the Mozart spiritual drama is yes first a mass but more than that a spiritual opera about the animal who fear death and the children who hope in spite of death in us......The Hogwood version make this very sensible and very clear it is more than a mass...We dont lack beautiful masses , we lack spiritual opera though...

For Schubert no one would deny that here the human heart incarnate himself in music score....He was so talented but so receptive that S. created you are right one of the most "humanly music" ever written... His choral and lieders are testimony of his greatness over almost everyone else...I dont even think that someone is over Schubert for creating more beautiful singing music...Save Mozart beside him....

I always thought that a requiem was a mass ?

For reasons not known to me, the worst things get , the calmer I get .

Two times in Army I was thought dead in hospital , Not really , I was whatever

you call almost dead but you come back.

Both times I was not in fear because wherever I was, there was no fear .

I love Mozart of course , but the other genius , Schubert,, brought the feelings

to me that Mozart bought to you guys , Mozart is the greatest writer of music .

But Schubert is the greatest writer of humanly music .

A musician sees Mozart, the Lady in Church sings Ava Maria ,

Schubert makes you think of all things human.

Very beautiful version but a mass of requiem and no more a drama and a spiritual theater...

It is like Bohm version a mass not an opera....I dont claim that it is not beautiful, it is....

But moving us nearer the abyss of fear and redemption at the same time, i only feel it with the Hogwood version....

By the way this work is like the art of the fugue, so much deep and beautiful, i collect all version and like them all....

But for the art of the fugue of Bach i like much the Neville Mariner version for example amongst them all ... Not because it is the better one, not at all, but because it make possible and more easier to listen to this everest of music one thousand time at least....

The variety of instruments used and the their limited numbers at the same time and the alternate parts with only harpsichord or organ is wonderful idea of Mariner...It make this abstract algebraic musical geometical feat lanscape a more human easy to grasp landscape...

«If you feel happy but dont feel death you are not near a volcano»-Anonymus Volcanologist

I like this French version of the Mozart .

I like this French  version of  the Mozart .

Me too... i used to play it often... 😁

And for me too....😊

My deepest respects to you....

A note: i was speaking about the Bohm 1971 version....I like it much but second after  Hogwood....

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.

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....

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. 
 

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 ,

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

Well Jim , 3 days ago I’m pretty sure I got ominun? , the newer virus , all the first

night was coughs and head aches , but my breath was normal and that would make me a fool to go to a hospital , home of death . Better 2nd day and this day,

still coughs but less ,

Glad i had 2 jabs and a booster,not bad for in your 80"s,

Besides , being brave like 70 % Scottish and rest German , I would beat the hell of

the non-jab crowd down there crying for the doc to wave his magic wand .

In a way it has/ is been good , on the edge of death I had no fear .

Yes Len I surely do agree with you and sympathise at the same time. I also think it is too late to reverse what we yes We have done to this planet. 

And I really don,t think the wee poison dwarf will win us our independence.

As Rab said "Sold for a passel O' silver " and it still goes on. Scotia forever.

Jim , in US lately we hear a bunch of trash , which is passed off as the future of Classical .

Discipline is needed in everything , just heard some MIT Scientists say the pollution of the seas is beyond fixing .

My heart aches for the little ones .

@jim5559      Yes you certainly got that one right but you have illuminated another point , in music like the drill field Discipline rules also . Where would we all be without our scales arpeggios, thirds fifths and octaves. Yes that is why the drill has to start early at three onwards. I pity that life and thank providence for the product of those years.  

Jim, point , Brits march much better than we do .

What you have left is world class .

On the Anglican Drill Field  a post  says "WAR IS WON ON THE  DRILL FIELD "

Point . Discipline !

As you know rv, they both drank from the well of Hungarian folk music .

To be honest I don't really know myself , often takes me a half -hour for one.

Often I can't  do the one I want .

Aye "jim5559"     I see you have been putting some lovely video files lately, as the drill sergeant would say Keep itUp. 

Jim5559,

‘Very nice selection. 
sounds a lot like his countryman, Bartok.

How do you transfer a video to this site?

That’s a good one rv☺😊

This is a jewel very rare here .

Read his bio, Kodaly did much for Classical with children.