Help me find good classical music, please.
 

OOT, I know very little about classical music other than I like it. Especially when I'm working. It helps me stay calm and stress free. I've purchased versions of the William Tell Overture and 1812. I was able to find them because I've heard of these works. I don't know any others. So help me compile a list of music to buy from itunes to juice up my ipod with some edumacated stuff.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

web page

short but there are a few good recs.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Chopin

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

NT, thanks.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

anything by Mozart and you can't go wrong

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

The term "classical" is very broad. It's like saying you like rock music.

A previous poster recommended both Chopin and Rachmaninoff. Both very talented, but very different styles and from different eras. It's almost like suggesting both Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin.

Rossini (composer of Will Tell) was a Romantic composer, so you may like other romantics like Paganini and Liszt.

I find the William Tell Overture to be similar to some 20th century American composers like Aaron Copeland. You might check him out as well. Leonard Bernstein also comes to mind.

Edit: me fail English? That's unpossible!

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

yeah...there are a million different periods of "classical" music.

most of what i like is late 19th or 20th century:

Stravinsky- "Rite of Spring," "Firebird," "Petrushka." (his classic early ballets). also "Agon," "Symphony of Psalms" "Threni," "L'histoire du Soldat" and most anything else.

Debussy- String Quartets, "La Mer," and all of his piano music.

Satie- pretty much anything

Bartok- string quartets, "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste,"

Stockhausen- Helicopter Quartet, anything from "Licht."

more traditional "classical" stuff:

anything from J.S. Bach, Beethoven quartets opus 131-135 and symphonies 3-9. berlioz "symphonie fantastique."

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

lol at people suggesting mozart, Im sure that was very helpful.

some of my personal favourites are: paganini, jason becker, and antonio lauro.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

[ QUOTE ]
yeah...there are a million different periods of "classical" music.

most of what i like is late 19th or 20th century:

Stravinsky- "Rite of Spring," "Firebird," "Petrushka." (his classic early ballets). also "Agon," "Symphony of Psalms" "Threni," "L'histoire du Soldat" and most anything else.

Debussy- String Quartets, "La Mer," and all of his piano music.

Satie- pretty much anything

Bartok- string quartets, "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste,"

Stockhausen- Helicopter Quartet, anything from "Licht."

more traditional "classical" stuff:

anything from J.S. Bach, Beethoven quartets opus 131-135 and symphonies 3-9. berlioz "symphonie fantastique."

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think some of these suggestions would be really good for a starting listener.

Stravinsky's stuff is pretty dissonant, and not all the pleasing to listen to sometimes. I'm more familiar with Bartok's piano based pieces, but even though are a little bit tough to listen to.

Mozart and Beethoven are obvious good starts, and I think adding in Brahms might be good as well because his stuff usually has nice warm harmonies.

I think Copland is a great simple start for people.

I'd also check out Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Handel, Holst, and Respighi. (I've mentioned it before and I'll mention it again - I LOVE the Pines of Rome, 4th movement - huge brass fanfare that's hard to dislike.)

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

I particularly like Gustav Holst - The Planets

It has different pieces to suit different moods. Mars and Jupiter are very famous and rousing anthems, some of the other pieces are mellow and tranquil.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

Debussy

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

[ QUOTE ]
I particularly like Gustav Holst - The Planets

It has different pieces to suit different moods. Mars and Jupiter are very famous and rousing anthems, some of the other pieces are mellow and tranquil.

[/ QUOTE ]

this is a solid recommendation. i always enjoyed playing these back in my high school orchestra days.

the copeland rec is also quite good, so i would suggest buying a cd where bernstein is conducting copeland. i think there's also a "bernstein's america" (or something like that), which is also a nice add for a new listener. i listen to these cd's when i write papers...

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

Bach, Beethoven, and Berlioz.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

OK, cool. Glad you like some of this music.

Advice: First, if you decide to devote even one hour of your life to learning about classical music, you are sooner or later going to cross paths with some of the kookiest and most committed snobs in the western world: Ignore them please, except when they're being just tremendously huge sissies, because then they're kind of funny. You have a food background right? It's not too different. In fact my pocket Venn diagram shows significant overlap.

Classical music can be as good as anything on earth, but there are a lot of pitfalls out there. Here are a few:

1) it's a super broad term. "Classical music" refers to a huge tangle of styles and categories and germans with syphilis covering like the last 600 years.

2) when it's bad it's really bad

3) and there sooo many kinds of bad. Bad composers. Bad pieces by good composers. Bad performances of good pieces. Bad recommendations of good performances of good pieces.

and no offense to anyone upthread--I think people generally gave you good advice here--but to the dude who recommended beethoven's late string quartets to CDC...are you freaking kidding me? Dude. I'm glad that you like them, and god knows I like them too (indeed I like most of your recs), but how can you recommend those in this situation--holy crap when smart seventh graders ask you for some good summer reading do you hand them [censored] Joyce? Gaah!

and my #3 above touches on one problem with simply downloading a zillion things from itunes...there are lots of crummy performances (of good music) out there. If you do a search for "1812 overture" on amazon you're going to get hundreds of different versions, and believe it or not this really does matter: some of the different versions and interpretations are essentially not going to sound like the same piece of music.

My advice:

first and most importantly, just keep paying attention to what you like. Unoriginal, I know...but there it is. Sometimes listen to the classical station on Sirius or whatever. (And actually, the classical music channel on your local cable TV is probably a better choice than the one on your local radio [as your radio station is pressured to play x% of obscure stuff, while your cable tv will have one option that's like "classical pops" or "classical lite"...probably perfect for you right now.])

I see that I went with the brackets within parenthesis there. Awesome.

so anyway just listen to some of these stations and maybe jot down a few of your likes/dislikes.

You might notice a pattern developing, maybe that you tend to like stuff with a full orchestra better than stuff played by a few instruments, or maybe that you wrote Tchaikovsky's name down four times, or maybe that you just heard one of those Beethoven late string quartets and it made you want to wash your mouth out with led zeppelin for three hours before you were ready for more Tchaikovsky.

once you have a few of these ideas, it's time to buy some music. Let's say for instance you wanted to get a version (or two) of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It's tough because there are hundreds--actually thousands--of performances of this work. So here's what I would do (in order of preference) to sort them all out.

a) buy a book. Lots of books exist that will have a blurb or two on pretty much everything in the entire classical canon, and they will give you reliable enough advice on which performances to look for. Most of these will also give you a little historical context, and maybe give you a few ideas for more music you might like. I'll give you specific book recs, but I read all these a decade ago so your best bet is to browse in the store. But there was a book by Parker "Building a Classical Music Library," and a book by Goulding with the snappy title "Classical Music." Neither of these is remotely perfect, but whatever.

2) go to the record store. Oh [censored] I forgot does Tower still exist? If it does, they often have a good classical department. Suck it up and ask the dude behind the classical desk if he has recommendations for a version of the William Tell Overture. You two will then have a charming ten minute conversation because he's an authentically nice & earnest guy who has been waiting for the last three weeks to prove to a guy like you just how big his brain is. And bonus, if you mention that you cook you will very likely get his phone number.

2b) if you're at the store and there's no classical guy working, look around for the store copy of the "Penguin Guide"...it will be this dog-eared paperback brick of a book filled with nothing but recommendations. The writing in it sucks--every piece of music will be "plangent" or "stentorian" or "seraphic" or "mephistophelian"--but it will do the job and you will feel somewhat cheerful carrying it around. I dunno, it has a good weight.

...in no time you will see that there's a core group of reliable orchestras, conductors, performers, and record labels that you can usually trust.

then you're off to the races. And listen man, we will eagerly welcome you to our tribe, our ninny nation, we are literally dying off at a rate of around 2% per day, just this morning I believe Mort from Cleveland passed away, polio FTW, Mort was the last guy in the USA who knew who Mendelssohn was.

And listen, like everything else in the world, none of this is even half as hard as it sounds during orientation. Just start with what you like and go from there.

representative example:
We could talk about this for a long time, but at the end of the day my favorite classical composer is J.S. Bach. In my opinion he's on the shortest list of incomprehensible geniuses that earth has ever offered up. But that said, I would not recommend (to you, to anyone) like around 2/3 of his music. Yeah. Bach is my favorite guy ever...and I honestly like less than half his music. (OK it's not totally fair, he was super prolific.) But it gets worse: of the 1/3 that I do like, I could only recommend at most like 1/2 of the performances. So now if you just walked up and snagged something at random from the Bach section, you're a 5:1 dog to grab something good. And to seal the argument, my favorite work of Bach's at the moment is a piano piece called The Goldberg Variations. But a) it took me like five years of listening before I realized how much I liked it; b) I would seldom give it to someone just starting out because it's not really user-friendly; and c) I own maybe twenty different performances of the Goldberg Variations, and of those twenty there are only two that I would take to a desert island. So [censored]! Here we have my favorite thing ever composed by my favorite guy ever, and I still can't recommend it to people without like three minutes of qualification. Classical music is a huge pain.

But it's also really wonderful so please ignore this post if I seem to be coming down too much in the camp of the pain.

Last thing: I don't want to give too much in the way of specific advice because it all depends. But I'll just name a couple representative composers from a handful of broad musical periods...so before you reject any giant chunks of classical music you're going to need to reject the best of these guys first.


BAROQUE
J.S. Bach

CLASSICAL
Mozart
Beethoven

ROMANTIC
Chopin
Rossini
Tchaikovsky
Grieg
Saint-Saens

LATE-ROMANTIC/MODERN (be careful)
Debussy
Copland
Gershwin
Rachmaninoff
Prokofiev

this is by no means a Best In Show list--I didn't even mention middle ages/renaissance or modern/postmodern--but it's just that if I had to guess, it sounds like you, CSC, are at first going to be drawn to music with terrific melodies, so these are some of the dozens of composers who might offer you that. Lots of people first enter into classical music through Tchaikovsky (think: The Nutcracker), and consequently there are lots of overripe affected pinheads walking around the world who like to give people grief for liking Tchaikovsky. Stab them with a fork in the neck. We hate them.

So I dunno, just stay true to what you like, and in no time you too will be distinguishing between a concerto and a chamber orchestra, between Schubert and Schumann, and dodging forks from multiple directions.

also if you're ever wondering how to pronounce someone's name, answers.com is usually pretty good

fwiw, the first thing I remember listening to was Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev (Bernstein narrating)--I'm only mentioning it because it was a decent way for me to learn what each instrument kind of sounded like. Carnival of the Animals, composed by Saint-Saens, is also in this genre, and I think there's even a single CD that has both of these pieces (complete with the cornball narration of Bernstein) on there. Though I'll tell you what, the one with Gielgud narrating might be even better (...but then Gielgud doesn't narrate the Carnival of the Animals, and anyway, the CotA conducted by Dutoit is definitely performed better than either of those two, and with Dutoit you might even accidentally run into his version of Danse Macabre, which is awesome, and etc et cetera you get it).

yes, I love classical music. But then for the last three weeks I've basically listened to nothing but the Beatles and Zeppelin and Bob. I'm just saying please don't worry, I'm not trying to get you to commit to some major lifestyle decision here...I'll leave that to the dude I mentioned in the Tower classical department.

[img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

I will tell you that I'm not that experienced with classical music (much more of a rock/metal/punk guy)...but there a few select pieces of classical music that are absolutely mind-blowing.

The first is "Night on Bald Mountain" by Mussorgsky (although I believe the more well-known versions of this was a reworking of the original by Rimsky-Korsakov).

Either way - I think it's a great first piece of classical music to get into - it's relatively short & easily digestible - and stunningly beautiful.

I haven't tested the link - but I think you can hear it here:

http://www.musopen.com/view.php?type=piece&id=178

The other is the Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. Still very popular & widely performed. You've heard pieces of it if you've ever seen the movies The Shining or Sleeping with the Enemy.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

This is awesome guys, thank you. I spent about $75 last night buying stuff from the thread NT linked, and will spend about $75 more tonight based on this thread.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

Granted, the post I wrote yesterday was incredible. But I still thought I owed it to the 2p2 community to follow up with a list.

Here is a list of classical music that I think is really easy to like. It's not a list of my absolute personal favorites, it's just a list that I made especially for anyone who might be curious about classical music and could use a few suggestions to get started.

after the title of each piece, in parenthesis I'm going to put a little info on a specific recording of it that I think is terrific. Of course there are lots of other great versions out there, but there are also plenty of skunky ones.


ALLEGRI
--Miserere (Tallis Scholars, Peter Philips, often paired on a CD with Palestrina's missa papae marcelli)
OK, it's killing me not to tell you the story of this piece, but then I'll probably feel that way about half the things on here, so I'm just going to make it my policy to let others elaborate.

BACH
--Brandenburg Concerti (Pinnock, English Concert)
--Double Concerto in D minor for two violins (Mutter, Accardo, English Chamber Orch; angel/EMI)
--The Goldberg Variations (played by Gould, 1955 version)

dang there was a really great and quirky Bach compilation on an old cassette series called "CBS Classical 90s"; I still have that tape, I really need to transfer it to CD
anyway the tape was later condensed by CBS/Odyssey and crammed onto a shorter CD, they totally botched it but some good stuff survived, mainly...

--the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (transcription by Ormandy, this is way better than other people's transcriptions in my opinion. Ormandy, Philadelphia orchestra)


BARBER
--Adagio for Strings (Bernstein or Slatkin)

BEETHOVEN
--Piano Concerto #5 (Fleisher on piano conducted by Szell)
--selected piano sonatas: Pathetique, Moonlight, Appassionata (Serkin piano); Waldstein, Les Adieux (Giles piano)
--Symphony #5 (Kleiber, Vienna Philharmonic)
--Symphony #7 (Kleiber, Vienna Philharmonic)
--Symphony #9 (Reiner, Chicago Symphony Orch)

BRAHMS
--Hungarian Dances (Masur, Leipzig Orch)
--Requiem (Klemperer, Philharmonia Orch)

CHOPIN
--tons of great piano music
add it all together and there would be around 150 Ballades, Mazurkas, Nocturnes, Waltzes, Etudes, Polonaises, Preludes, Scherzos, and some other stuff I'm forgetting. You can't go too wrong sampling these with some compilation CD like Mad About Chopin or whatever. In general, there's no shame in buying compilations to get a sense of a composer's approach. And some hokey-looking series like the "Mad About" series usually do a decent job.
some pianists you can trust with Chopin include: Pollini, Rubinstein, Zimerman, Ashkenazy

COPLAND
--Appalachian Spring (Bernstein)
--Fanfare for the Common Man (Bernstein)

DEBUSSY
--Prelude a l'Apres Midi d'un Faune (Haitnik)
--piano music including Clair de Lune (Weissenberg or Roge or Gieseking or Michelangeli or others)

FAURE
--Pavane (Dutoit, Montreal)

GERSHWIN
--Rhapsody in Blue (Bernstein)

GRIEG
--Peer Gynt Suites (Beecham, Royal Phil)
--Piano Concerto in A (Perihia)

HANDEL
--Water Music (Pinnock)

HOLST
--The Planets (Boult, London Phil)

JOPLIN
--piano rags (Rifkin)

LISZT
--Paganini Etudes (Watts on piano, especially Etude #6, the theme and variations)

MASCAGNI
--intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana (Jarvi)

MOZART
--Piano Concertos (there are 27 of these, I get the numbers mixed up, but #21 is the most famous)(good dudes performing them include: Perahia, Serkin, Casadeus, Ashkenazy, Giles)
--Overtures from the operas (esp the overtures to Magic Flute, Figaro, and Don Giovanni) (Marriner good conductor here)
--selected piano sonatas: K331, K332, K545 (lots of good choices for pianists; I like Klien)
--Requiem (Karajan)
--more piano: variations on Twinkle Twinkle little star (A Je vous Dirai Maman)...these are not going to change your life but they reminded me of something that I forgot to mention in my post yesterday: Variations are a great way to learn a little about how classical music works. First you hear the theme played in a simple way, and then the composer alters the theme into a lot of different forms and often stretches it to the breaking point. Look out!
--Serenades, especially #10 (Schneider) and #13 (Walter)
--Symphony #40 (Bernstein)
--Symphony #41 (Bernstein)

ORFF
--Carmina Burana (Blomstedt, San Francisco)

PACHELBEL
--Canon (Palliard conducting Palliard Chamber Orch, I mention it partly b/c it's on a really good RCA Victor baroque compilation CD)

PROKOFIEV
--Peter and the Wolf (Gielgud narrating)
--Classical Symphony #1 (Ormandy, good CD that also has Love for three oranges suite and lieutenant Kije suite)
--Romeo and Juliet (especially the Montagues and the Capulets) (Levi, Montreal)

RACHMANINOFF
--Piano Concerto #2 (Rubinstein)
--Vocalise (Moffo, soprano; Stokowski, conductor)

RAVEL
--Bolero (Dutoit, Montreal)

RIMSKY KORSAKOV
--Scheherazade (Reiner, Chicago Symphony Orch, often paired with Reiner/CSO's equally great version of Debussy's La Mer)

ROSSINI
--Overture to The Barber of Seville (Reiner, CSO)
--William Tell Overture (Reiner, CSO)

SAINT-SAENS
--Carnival of the Animals (Dutoit, Montreal)
--Danse Macabre (Dutoit, Phil Orchestra)

SCHUBERT
--Impromptus for piano (Perahia)
--piano sonata in B flat, D960 (Brendel)
--andante from the piano trio in E flat D929 (Beaux Arts Trio)
--theme and variations from the trout quintet (Curzon)
--Symphony #8 (Solti)

SCHUMANN
--lots of piano music, especially Carnival, and also Kinderscenen (Rubinstein or Shelly are good pianists here)
--Dichterliebe (it's a song-cycle) (Wunderlich singing, please don't [censored] with this)

SIBELIUS
--Finlandia (Stein)

SMETANA
--The Moldau (from Ma Vlast) (Szell)

STRAUSS, Johann II
--lots of waltzes e.g. Waltz of the Beautiful Blue Danube (Reiner, CSO)

STRAVINSKY
--Rite of Spring (Muti)

TCHAIKOVSKY
--first movement of Violin Concerto in D (Nishizaki violin, Jean conducting, it's on Naxos label)
--Marche Slave (Dutoit, Montreal)
--Nutcracker Suite (Rostropovich)

VILLA-LOBOS
--bachiana brasileria #5 (Moffo, Stokowski)

VIVALDI
--The Four Seasons (

WAGNER
--Orchestral selections (Szell or Bernstein or Reiner)


OK everyone, I'm very sorry that I left off your favorite piece by your favorite composer. And obviously there are tons of holes up there, it's really a slapdash list, but hey--at least none of it is remotely subjective. Anyway, for an easy-listening Classical 101 type syllabus that I intentionally made with an emphasis on good melodies, it probably could be worse. For the record, most everything on this list is relatively famous (some of it to the point of caricature), but then there are a few items up there that maybe you haven't heard.

please note that there's no opera, because I hate opera.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

These are two really effing good posts.

That said, don't talk Sibelius without talking violin concerto.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

[ QUOTE ]
The term "classical" is very broad. It's like saying you like rock music.

A previous poster recommended both Chopin and Rachmaninoff. Both very talented, but very different styles and from different eras. It's almost like suggesting both Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin.

Rossini (composer of Will Tell) was a Romantic composer, so you may like other romantics like Paganini and Liszt.

I find the William Tell Overture to be similar to some 20th century American composers like Aaron Copeland. You might check him out as well. Leonard Bernstein also comes to mind.

Edit: me fail English? That's unpossible!

[/ QUOTE ]


I just listened to Ode to teh common man, it is now my alarm every morning. There will be many a half drunk mornings where I will be waking up to this song, and do a half-naked, fairly drunk, slow-mo, touchdown run to my bathroom to take a shower.

Re: Help me find good classical music, please.
 

Here is some really accesible music that you will probably like:

Beethoven: Pathetique piano sonata, Moonlight sonata, 5th and 9th symphonies, 5th piano concerto (emperor)


Dvorak: Symphony no 9

Schubert: Unfinished Symphony

Tchaikovsky: 5th Symphony, Romeo and Juliet


Some music which may not be as accesible, but which I like a lot:

Ravel piano concerto in G

Beethoven String quartets (there are many, and some of them are very very difficult to listen to

Beethoven Kreutzer violin sonata

Shostakovich 5th symphony, cello concerto

Sibelius violin concerto

Mahler symphony no 5

Prokofieff: violin concerto, romeo and juliet

Mendelssohn violin concerto

This is just what i thought of off the top of my head, there's lots more and this isn't even really a list of my favorite stuff, just what i've listened to lately.