classical music recommendations

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The only person you have to satisfy, as a composer, is yourself.

The New York Times Music Critic, Harold Schoenberg, made a comment in his book, Lives of the Great Composers, that what composers that are currently living are great? Either composers are writing music that is so obtuse, no one understands it, or there is a great composer living among us, and we, the people are too stupid to notice him or her.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, as a musicologist, and a vocalist (and hopefully, once my surgeries are completed on both my wrists, a clarinetist), is we who perform the serious music, that the concert hall and the opera house are now little more than a museum. How often does the music in the Fleischer collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia, for example,get performed? Other than historic performances in the Free Library's collection that WRTI-FM broadcasts the first Sunday in the month, not much.

Also, remember, it was composers starting with Beethoven and continuing to the present day, who were writing for posterity. Composers like Buxtehude, Schuetz, Bach, Haendel and Haydn considered themselves to be indentured servants, and we're writing music for their present time.

Problem is I'm never satisfied because I have no way of evaluating what I have done. Each note, harmony, whatever evokes all the memories involved in their composition, and as a result I never hear the piece as a whole but as a sum of details. It's a central coherence thing I suppose.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqODySSxYpc[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUjrLtLXG60[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtA2qtBgMA4[/youtube]

I'm glad someone else likes Schoenberg's masterpiece Verklarte Nacht. I prefer the original version for string sextet, even though I'm pretty sure Schoenberg himself arranged it for string orchestra.

If he were anyone else, I'd think he'd arranged it for financial rather than artistic reasons.

Anyone capable of writing Verklarte Nacht must be taken seriously as a composer. I'm trying to appreciate his other works. So far, the only ones I've cracked are the pre-twelve tone Pelleas et Mellisande and Chamber Symphonies.

I may be showing my age here, but I learned only a few years ago that I could listen to almost any classical piece I wanted to whenever I wanted on YouTube.

I recommend the Talk Classical discussion board for learning about new music to sample.

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I think the last Borodin I posted in this thread was Polovtsian Dances.

He wrote his String Quartet No. 2 during his stay in Zhitovo, Russia in 1881.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9chhQ2CM66E[/youtube]

Funny that you mention Talk Classical because I've been a member there since 2009. IMHO though, if you can't appreciate Schoenberg's later works then you are missing out on a lot of fine classical sentiment. On the other hand I do realize that it takes a retraining of the ears to find all of those sentiments in a new tonal system. Schoenberg always was into pastoral, heroic, and other classical themes as opposed to composers like Boulez who wanted to write a new page in music themes for the classical world, hard and alien themes.

Verklarte Nacht certainly has some beautiful examples of enharmonics, sometimes I can't believe the breadth of Schoenberg's accomplishment that he was able to write with such inspiration across different tonal schemes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rt2pJ2AFpY[/youtube]

Talk about a late romance giant, Medtner was one of a kind. Can't believe he's been so underrepresented.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLxDCaOEag[/youtube]

I'm working on this at the moment.

I've been away from this thread for a while...time to kick some life back into these old bones!

Here's a piece that I recently discovered! The whole symphony is great, but (as usual) I'm quite partial to the slow movement:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o11NUNP2GP4[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzA51E_RG9I[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdDBN5jWN6c[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZdDAQN0M9o[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM0E4Vqb508[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RjhzTohsKo[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSXj48lkFew[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM2gTj8F0lw[/youtube]