Your favourite classical pieces

W

weaksauce

Regular
For those of you who listen to some calssical, which do you like the most?

So far I'd say bethoovens moonlight sonata and pachelbels canon (mozart rmx) :smile:

I like that kind of more chilled classical, any recommendations?
 
Young Pavarotti singing Nabucco. Unparalleled.

Otherwise, Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto.
 
Since you didn't say Western classical...

Thanjavur S. Kalyanaraman's rendition of Samajavaragamana -- utterly blows my mind, and there's a subtle detail and depth to every single note from alapana all through swara prstharas. The little games he plays with rhythm and how M.S. and T.V. Gopalakrishnan both have answers to every one of those calculations. And through it all, everybody maintains laser precision in every aspect completely essaying all of Hindolam while still tugging at your heart-strings and never just showboating for the hell of it... Everything is beyond words. Frankly, anything he sang was at that level, but this is one that blew me away within the very first grab.

I understand that most people don't understand the concept of alapana and find it empty or boring and seemingly without structure (poor fools), so for your benefit, I'll just let you know that the actual "song" part of it starts about 17 and a half minutes in.
 
ShootMyMonkey said:
Since you didn't say Western classical...

Thanjavur S. Kalyanaraman's rendition of Samajavaragamana -- utterly blows my mind, and there's a subtle detail and depth to every single note from alapana all through swara prstharas. The little games he plays with rhythm and how M.S. and T.V. Gopalakrishnan both have answers to every one of those calculations. And through it all, everybody maintains laser precision in every aspect completely essaying all of Hindolam while still tugging at your heart-strings and never just showboating for the hell of it... Everything is beyond words. Frankly, anything he sang was at that level, but this is one that blew me away within the very first grab.

I understand that most people don't understand the concept of alapana and find it empty or boring and seemingly without structure (poor fools), so for your benefit, I'll just let you know that the actual "song" part of it starts about 17 and a half minutes in.
Click to expand...
I don't like it. It's boring to me. Probably because I don't understand a word of it and didn't grow up with it.
 
Frank said:
Probably because I don't understand a word of it and didn't grow up with it.
Click to expand...
I don't understand a word of it either -- it's in Telugu, which I don't speak, and the first 17 minutes don't even have words (it's a purely melodic essay). And I didn't grow up around Western music either, but I still listen to and enjoy that. The difference being that in either case, I have a theoretical understanding.

Granted, listening to performance of Western music doesn't demand the theoretical understanding that it takes with other systems. It's designed to be approachable to everyone... people often forget that the music of Mozart or Bach was the pop music of its era. It's designed to play to a very generic crowd and has largely simplified and lost melodic complexity over the years in favor of harmonics and layering.

In a crowd of 200 listeners at a classical concert, very very very very few (often zero) people really understand something about music, the others will be pretentious yuppies who let it wash over them and quote whatever someone else says when pressed for an opinion. In a crowd of 200 listeners to an Indian classical music concert about 100 will have Bachelor's or Master's Degrees in Music, and 20 or so will have Ph.Ds, about 10 or so will be skilled performers themselves, maybe 20 more will be people with music minors in school, and the remaining few will be the children of various others among the group. People who can read within a single note that you've transitioned from 8:1 to 27:3 time (which he did a few times in that song, which I know you didn't pick up on). Which is why over the years Indian classical, Chinese classical, and other older Eastern musical systems have grown in complexity on all aspects over the years, particularly in the 20th century.

Compare that to an example of the same type of music from a school of rendering krithis that was 2 generations prior, and the difference is quite apparent (though that is from a performance in the UN, so it was sort of "Americanized" to make it easy on Western listeners, but the vocals at least are still relatively canonical for that era)... even 1 generation prior, you can see the difference both ways...
 
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hm....lots...

various works by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky...


How do you classify John Williams? There are a lot of modern instrumental orchestrated pieces that I like too..
 
John Williams goes up there with every other famous classical composer in history, at least for me. He really is quite talented. :)
 
digitalwanderer said:
John Williams goes up there with every other famous classical composer in history, at least for me. He really is quite talented. :)
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You'd probably like Richard Strauss, then, who for most listeners now is probably only known for Also Sprach Zarathrustra from 2001. John Williams, though, is practically a carbon copy of Richard Strauss, stylistically speaking (and yes, he does lift bars out of Strauss' compositions from time to time, but it's not really pure plagiarism).
 
I actually have an old vinyl album somewhere of the UofI summer orchestra program where we played a cool arrangement opening with Zarathustra and segued into a selection of Gustav Holtz "The Planets".

"Mars" & "Zarathustra" go well together for some reason. (I'm a cellist, which should explain my penchant for Bach. ;) )
 
I listen to a lot of classical pieces from OSTs e.g. Ennio Morricone (Once upon a time in America/the West), Hans Zimmer (Gladiator, The Rock, Pearl Harbor).
If you are in a sad/nostalgic mood I'd recommend Albinoni's Adagio and Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings...
Carl Off's Carmina Burana, Ravel's Bolero (the latter pretty much sounds allways the same throughout but it's strangely soothing).
Btw not really classical as such but I've recently discovered the anime called "Elfen Lied" and the Lilium music intro is one of the best classical/opera piece of music I've ever heard.
 
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digitalwanderer said:
I actually have an old vinyl album somewhere of the UofI summer orchestra program where we played a cool arrangement opening with Zarathustra and segued into a selection of Gustav Holtz "The Planets".
Click to expand...
Hmmm... how long ago was this? I might have been there for it (yeah, I'm also a UofI grad), but I was told at the time that it wasn't the first time they did it.
 
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