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I like late 19th - early 20th Century music myself, I find it more stirring and complex. Wagner, Sibelius and Shostakovich are my big 3, but getting into Bruckner, Brahms, Bartok and Prokoviev at the moment. It's important to give the music time to sink in and grow on you, don't expect to fall in love with it straight away. I hope the same goes for JFH.
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The classical music thread on 00:52 - Jan 10 with 5639 views
The classical music thread on 00:27 - Jan 10 by MrSheen
I like late 19th - early 20th Century music myself, I find it more stirring and complex. Wagner, Sibelius and Shostakovich are my big 3, but getting into Bruckner, Brahms, Bartok and Prokoviev at the moment. It's important to give the music time to sink in and grow on you, don't expect to fall in love with it straight away. I hope the same goes for JFH.
I prefer the more simpler orchestra.
Beer and Beef has made us what we are - The Prince Regent
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The classical music thread on 01:54 - Jan 10 with 5623 views
Some great classical bargains on Amazon Digital Music.
Picked up Yehudi Menuin - 12 violin concertos for just 99p the other night.
Also good compilations for the general listener : there's a series of albums called Classical Music for the serious reader, about 30 tracks each, all albums less than three quid.
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The classical music thread on 02:03 - Jan 10 with 5615 views
Everyone should listen to Rachmaninov's piano concerto No.2 in their lifetime, I studied it when I was 10 and it was one of the best things I ever did. Listen to it and your wife will never forget, the love in the piece is incredible.
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The classical music thread on 02:16 - Jan 10 with 5604 views
Just seeing this thread made me smile. I`m no expert, but I love going to the Proms sometimes (still only a fiver to stand, to see some of the best musicians in the world perform in what must be one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world - amazing) and sometimes wonder if anyone else goes to Loftus Road and to that somewhat different environment.
I`m a particular fan of all kinds of Beethoven (a big f***ing German) and love a bit of Mahler too... Anyone unconvinced, just sit back and listen to this for 12 minutes of your life. Mahler`s Resurrection Symphony (with a huge choir) is overwhelming live - I`d recommend it to anyone.
[Post edited 10 Jan 2016 2:34]
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The classical music thread on 07:37 - Jan 10 with 5560 views
The classical music thread on 02:09 - Jan 10 by QPRMUSO
Everyone should listen to Rachmaninov's piano concerto No.2 in their lifetime, I studied it when I was 10 and it was one of the best things I ever did. Listen to it and your wife will never forget, the love in the piece is incredible.
Beat me to it. If you want to use the awesome correctly it's awesome and magnificent at the same time. Beethoven's piano sonatas always do it for me. The piano was a new invention in Ludwig's time. The sort of Fender Stratocaster of it's day. Daniel Barenboin plays it like that. Lastly, Haydn or should I say firstly. Modern classical music started with Haydn.
[Post edited 10 Jan 2016 9:35]
Strong and stable my arse.
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The classical music thread on 09:22 - Jan 10 with 5529 views
As a humble Prog house/Trance Dj of the 90's , this would start every set of mine. i nicked the idea off DJ paul oakenfold he wove classical music/soundtracks into his sets made famous at the courtyard, Cream, Liverpool.
for those that know Sasha , I Used to go to his nights called 'Tyrant' in the late 90's and the first hour of the night would always be classical until the prog house/trance and dirty techno kicked in. the building atmosphere was incredible.
an example on his groundbreaking 'Fluoro' cd from 1996 ,good copies changing hands for silly money on discogs..i have two !
mixes at start, and again around 8 mins
tHE Bowie/ catherine deneuve film 'the hunger' had a huge impact on me as a teenager. the classical soundtrack was a real jaw w dropping moment for a scruffy east ender on a council estate such as moi., whose only exposure to classical music would have been adverts for cup a soups in the 70's.
great thread metallica!
[Post edited 10 Jan 2016 11:54]
The Duke Of New York. A-Number One.
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The classical music thread on 12:19 - Jan 10 with 5465 views
Although blues, soul, ska, jazz and punk would be my musical preferences, I do like and dabble into a bit of classic now and then. No harm in it at all. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and the fantastic The Lark Ascending, the nearest anyone got to imitating birdsong with instruments are favourites of mine. The former has to be played loud. I also love The Planets by Gustav Holst. Lots of other great composers I admire too but I avoid modern classic stuff [ you know, long 12 minute silences and then a tuneless jangle of noise and human wailing from nowhere ] and Brahms does my head in too.
There aint half been some clever bastards.
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The classical music thread on 12:35 - Jan 10 with 5445 views
I was brought up in a house where the only music was Irish, Country, or, worst of all, Country & Irish. The only instrument I ever played was the recorder as a nipper. The first music I got into was punk. When you're 15, hearing a 21 year-old singing about their feelings is exhilarating, but it wears off by the time you get to 25.By the, the heroes you had when you were young who aren't dead or haven't walked away are going on about their latest break-up, how hard life is on the road, or moaning vaguely about the state of the planet. You soon realise that the music industry is a hype machine trying to peddle the same old crap under new guises, as long as you keep buying. I found I wasn't listening to the words any more, but getting my pleasure from the music and the emotions it stirred in me directly.
I got into World Music, which had the additional benefit that I couldn't understand what they were going on about in Urdu, Wolof, etc, but increasingly found I was listening to Classical music, that just moves me in a more profound way than anything else. It's almost all I listen to now - apart, oddly, from the music I loved as a fifteen-year-old. The difficult part is getting to know what's out there, and finding the time to appreciate it properly.
It's much easier now that the internet will tell you where that jingle, theme tune or piece of film music comes from. I picked up my familiarity in all sorts of odd ways - Desert Island Discs was a great way to discover new music when I was too intimidated to listen to Radio 3. Spotify, etc are great resources, but very hard to navigate all the different choices - by the time you have typed Shostakovich Symphony in a search, you can't read the results. Radio 3's "Building a Library" podcast, which I think has just been renamed "Record Review", is a great educational source. The idea is to compare different versions of the same piece to pick a best recording, but along the way you learn a hell a lot about the piece and the performers.
The best way to let a piece grow on you is to play it over and over in the background - for instance when you are driving or on your headphones on the way to work. Soon you progress from recognising small passages, to linking them together into long sessions and anticipating them when they come up, and stopping what you're doing to turn it up and listen.
As someone said, classical concerts are unbelievably great value. Myself, i find the Royal Albert Hall too big and unless you are prepared to stand you are too far from the performers. At the Royal Festival for £30-40 you can sit within 10 metres of the performers. You get to enjoy the genius of the composition, the work on of the conductor in interpreting the score and deciding how he wants dozens of players to come together to make it sound, and the benefit of hundreds of thousands of hours of training and refinement from the musicians, from world-class soloists like Denis Matsuev and Lisa Batiashvili to the humblest and most obscure 8th cellists or 5th trumpeter. You're crazy if you've never gone, but it is worth investing some time in the listening to at least some of the programmed music first, or it just won't make the impression it should.
As for opera...there's a lot that's inherently ludicrous about it, from portly and aging romatic leads to "director's theatre", when a director will transpose a production of Parsifal to a brothel in 1970s Nicaragua, for seemingly no better reason than to annoy his largely bourgeois audience and get himself noticed. Lots of the repertoire makes no impression on me. I've seen people in floods of tears at the end of La Traviata while all I've been thinking about is getting a drink afterwards, but I don't know any more than anyone else. I shut my eyes and see where the music takes me.
Anyway, enough gassing, how about some music. From my holy trinity, the eerie, yearning Prelude of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
Waltraud Maier pulls out all the stops at the end for Isolde's Liebestod
The adagio of Sibelius' violin concerto, played by what appears to be Andy Townshend.
Shostakovich's brilliant 4th symphony, just on the right side of modernist plinky-plonk.
Some bonuses - the last part of Bartok's very strange Duke Bluebeard's Castle, given the Duran Duran video treatment.
Denis Matsuev plays Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto. 21 minutes in, the big man starts gently, then goes on the rampage.
Bach's 5th Brandenburg Concerto. I normally find Bach a bit too mathematical and restrained, but 6 minutes into this well-behaved piece, the harpsichordist goes off on one like he's auditioning for Lynyrd Skynyrd 200 years early.
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The classical music thread on 17:56 - Jan 10 with 5344 views
The classical music thread on 00:13 - Jan 10 by Metallica_Hoop
Sorry MH, just noticed you had the 5th Brandenburg as well.
While I'm on, there's a great site called backtrack.com. You can search for when and where a particular piece is on in Europe over the next year. Or put a time and place in and see what's on there.
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The classical music thread on 18:28 - Jan 10 with 5331 views
Great thread. Ive only just started listening to classic fm the past year or so and i got to say i really enjoy listening to some of it,depending on my mood. I prefer the gentler more chilled stuff .
You also get to hear great movie soundtracks like this..
Occasional providers of half decent House music.
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The classical music thread on 04:53 - Jan 11 with 5232 views
The classical music thread on 11:49 - Jan 10 by Discodroids
As a humble Prog house/Trance Dj of the 90's , this would start every set of mine. i nicked the idea off DJ paul oakenfold he wove classical music/soundtracks into his sets made famous at the courtyard, Cream, Liverpool.
for those that know Sasha , I Used to go to his nights called 'Tyrant' in the late 90's and the first hour of the night would always be classical until the prog house/trance and dirty techno kicked in. the building atmosphere was incredible.
an example on his groundbreaking 'Fluoro' cd from 1996 ,good copies changing hands for silly money on discogs..i have two !
mixes at start, and again around 8 mins
tHE Bowie/ catherine deneuve film 'the hunger' had a huge impact on me as a teenager. the classical soundtrack was a real jaw w dropping moment for a scruffy east ender on a council estate such as moi., whose only exposure to classical music would have been adverts for cup a soups in the 70's.
great thread metallica!
[Post edited 10 Jan 2016 11:54]
Gatecrasher nicked that off you some ten years later--Adagio For Strings was the first track on Disc 2 of the Disco-tech compilation, leading into Skip Raiders - Another Day!
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The classical music thread on 08:34 - Jan 11 with 5203 views
The classical music thread on 17:56 - Jan 10 by MrSheen
Sorry MH, just noticed you had the 5th Brandenburg as well.
While I'm on, there's a great site called backtrack.com. You can search for when and where a particular piece is on in Europe over the next year. Or put a time and place in and see what's on there.
You sure it's Backtrack? I got a railway services site. it sounds good though!
Beer and Beef has made us what we are - The Prince Regent
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The classical music thread on 08:55 - Jan 11 with 5193 views