Let's talk music, no genre boundaries

@audio-b-dog ​​@frogman, @mahgister :

I feel so fortunate to have three music mentors to help me over the hurdle into enjoyment of Classical music. Thanks, guys!  

@frogman 

I greatly favor the Adams recording. This selection sounds somehow more akin to Jazz to my ear.

Maybe you can suggest more in a similar vein???  

@mahgister 

I’d heard Beethoven 6th before and found it pleasant ( I utilize this "lukewarm" adjective with some humility, recognizing the fault is mine for not appreciating it as you do). I just listened to Beethoven’s 7th and this I find immediately more engaging. Same goes for the Bruckner. I'm going to explore more Bruckner. 

@audio-b-dog 

Seems I was wrong -- I do have a capacity for enjoying orchestral music. It all comes down to the piece/performance. 

@stuartk 

I remember listening to Stravinsky's Firebird on my little, cheap college stereo. Man did I enjoy that. I think the mind is the most important compnent in an audio system. Willfull suspension of disbelief. You can fill in the bass that isn't there and the space that isn't there with your mind. 

Beethoven's 7th is a much more dynamic piece than his 6th which was written to be laid back. If you can find Carlos Kleiber doing it, he's considered very good. Very, very good because it took him forever to get out a recording. He broke the budget on over rehearsing. Most of his recordings are almost perfect. He also somehow managed to find as much expression as everyone else while sticking to the script. I don't know how he did it exactly. @frogman ?

Besides being a fantastic musician, Kleiber had a gift for establishing great rapport with the musicians in the orchestra.  He was greatly admired and liked by the players.  That is huge.  He also had a specific and relatively small repertoire. He didn’t conduct as many different works as other conductors and so dug very deep into the details of the works that he did conduct,  Fantastic conductor. 

Kleiber get the allegretto of my favorite symphony to a new meaningful level...( The greatest musical orchestral movement ever written in my opinion so strong it was in his effect on the soul)

I see a seed invincibly pushing rocks  to grow...

( i always see music or associate it with images not as a mere poetic expression of my feelings but more like a movie, i can for example wrote a novel about the Bruckner 5th because i listened to it so much and it entered into my imaginative perception as "the meaning of life " itself as we experience it after death , because of the structure of this work especially the final fugue recapitulating and integrating each movement from the beginning. Bruckner rival Bach  mastery of fugue here in a way Bach never did.)

For me the 7th is the symphony , the art of Beethoven symphony as a creative engine with an irresistible rythm of his own able to liberate humanity from the sleep of inertia , habit, and lack of motives...

Music is cure and thought meditation...( the allegretto of the 7th must be able to make some paralysed person to walk again against all odds, which other piece of music can do this? listen to it ) 

By the way i love Scriabin so much, because all his work motives core is sparking human heart to begin to be divinely creative again as Beethoven was inducing  it  particularly strongly in the 7th , it is clear as crystal...

Beethoven soul (not his style) is Scriabin forebear...A Promethean giant inspiring another one...

«... Scriabin... Where does he come from?
And who are his forebears?»

IGOR STRAVINSKY in Poetics of Music

It's time to talk about Shostakovich, a 20th century composer who cannot be overlooked. I heard his 5th symphony when I was young and have always had it on vinyl, but not a great performance. I did not venture further until Dudamel had a Shostakovich year, and I heard his tenth and twelfth, I think. They were too complicated to really register. I was reading Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" a few years ago. In the book he talked about two people staying up all night to discuss Shostakovich's 7th Symphony. So, I have been listening to it since. I posted a youtube video of the piece. It's very long, and if you haven't heard it, just listen to the first movement. @frogman stresses rhythm in music, and I think Shostakovich was deeply into rhythm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3zR_X25UU