101 Classical Music CDs

"For some listeners today, Telemann represents all that is boring in Baroque music: a constant patter of mindless musical patterns, churned out ad nauseum.... Classical music stations constantly program Telemann as a pleasantry, or palliative, before or after more demanding fare."* Ouch. I don't think I'd go quite so far. Telemann belongs to a group of (sometimes indistinguishable) Baroque-era composers such as Vivaldi, Rameau, Albinoni, Scarlatti and Corelli, Couperin and Purcell. And, certainly, classical music stations love to play this music because the pieces tend to be brief (it's hard to run ads on a radio station if you only play hour-long Mahler symphonies), pleasing to the ear, and yes, even palliative. ********************** Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) Concerto in D Major Overture-Suite in G Minor Overture-Suite in D Major Deutsche Grammophon, 1994 ********************** But you have to consider classical mu

This blog is the result of a New Year's resolution. I have a good-sized collection of classical music at home that has been collecting dust for years, and I wanted to make 2008 the year that I actually made an effort to listen to it. All of it. I have a reasonably thorough musical education, having played trumpet throughout elementary, middle and high school. I was also principal trumpet in my university wind ensemble for two years before I gave up playing. I also have some basic grounding in music theory and composition, although it's gone quite stale through years of disuse. However, there is much that I don't know about classical music, and one of the purposes of this blog is to force me, in a public forum no less, to learn and share thoughts about the discs in my collection as I listen to them. I'll also link to music selections on Amazon.com that are applicable to the composer or composition I'm featuring. Occasionally I'll write posts that hopefully will

Beginning classical music enthusiasts might look at this post and wonder, "Symphony #87? How the heck could this guy have written 87 symphonies? Beethoven only wrote nine!" ********************** Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker Haydn (1732-1809) Haydn: 6 "Paris" Symphonies, #82-87 (1785-6) Deutsche Grammophon, 1981 ********************** Actually, Haydn wrote 104 symphonies. But the symphony of Haydn's era was quite a different animal from the more serious and extended symphony of the Beethoven era. And in many ways Beethoven ruined things for everybody that came after him. After Beethoven, the entire notion of a symphony took on such a seriousness and a gravity that many great composers following Beethoven labored under his shadow. Brahms lacked the confidence even to attempt composing a symphony until late in his life. Beethoven had said all that needed to be said, and even the world's best composers lacked the audacity to say anything

Brahms is often referred to as "the third B" (following Bach and Beethoven) of the giants of classical music. But what's so compelling to me about Brahms was his self-critical nature and the ridiculously high-standards he set for himself. He constantly denigrated his compositions, even destroying much of his own work that was in his opinion substandard. If this guy thought his work was substandard, where does that leave the rest of us? To me the lesson here is that a creator can be the worst judge of his own work, and you should never let self-criticism interfere with your creative output. Now if I could just do that myself... ********************** Leonard Bernstein and the Weiner Philharmoniker Johannes Brahms Symphony #1 Academic Festival Overture Deutsche Grammophon, 1983 ********************** If you want to look for particularly gripping passages of Brahms' First Symphony, you can start by listening closely to the first few minutes of the second movement, which

Sibelius isn't just an overlooked composer in my music collection, he's also overlooked by many classical music fans. Today we'll cover a disc that includes his Symphony #2 and the patriotic, shorter work Finlandia. I'll start with Finlandia, which, at just over seven minutes in length, is a great piece for a Sibelius beginner to start with. It was written during a period of particularly heavy-handed control of Finland by Czarist Russia, and the piece is overtly patriotic and nationalistic. Finns consider this work a critical part of their cultural heritage. Let's move on to Sibelius' Symphony #2. My favorite anecdote about this work has to do with the circumstances under which it was written. It was 1901, and Sibelius had just left Finland for Italy: "The composer installed his wife and children in a boarding-house, and rented for himself a small hilltop villa above the town of Rapallo, in order to be able to work in peace... At one point during their sta

I'll tell you a little secret. I resent Mozart. No, I'm not some sort of modern-day Salieri. It's because I used to play the trumpet. ********************** James Levine and the Weiner Philharmoniker Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Symphony #29 Symphony #34 Deutsche Grammophon, 1986 ********************** No trumpet player likes Mozart and Mozart didn't like trumpet players. And the parts that trumpet players have to play in Mozart symphonies heartily show this dislike. Supposedly Mozart's baggage with the trumpet had more to do with the fact that the instruments of that day were valveless and didn't allow for the pitch control or the technical capabilities that his music typically required from other instruments. So he wrote his music they way he did, thank goodness for that. But he always gave the trumpets what we used to condescendingly call "oom-pah parts" (think John Sousa marches and what the french horns have to suffer through in those). And

Let me share a few words of encouragement for those of you who might be a bit intimidated by the potential time commitment involved in learning the great classical musical works. Most of us are accustomed to hearing our music in 3-4 minute songs, so it can seem like an enormous investment in time to get to know entire symphonies that can range from 30 minutes to more than an hour. Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony clocks in at a relatively brief 25 minutes, but even that can represent a significant time commitment if you want to listen closely to various sections of the symphony, or repeat a favorite movement a couple of times. Of course, symphonies by composers like Bruckner or Shostakovich can run an hour or more long. And we'll see even more extreme examples of length when we tackle Mahler in future posts. If you have a job, a family and a typically busy life, you won't often be able to drop everything and invest a non-trivial amount of time in listening closely to a sym