101 Classical Music CDs

101 Classical Music CDs is now one year old, and if you'll permit me a brief fit of gratitude, I'd like to list ten things I've learned and discovered from my first year of finally listening to my collection of classical music. 1) I learned how much I loved Mozart. I spent years hating Mozart's music as a high school trumpet player--as far as I was concerned, it was all oom-pah parts and rest-counting. It wasn't until I started this blog (and had high school recede 20 years into my past) that I could at last hear him through fresh ears. 2) I learned even more how much I loved Haydn (yep, trumpet playing again ), and it taught me never to take great composers like these for granted. 3) I became much more familiar with each and every one of Beethoven's symphonies , by itself a worthwhile exercise if there ever was one. 4) It taught me about less-well known composers like Sibelius , who were sitting on my CD shelf, collecting just as much dust as my Bach...

I'm listening to Vaughan Williams for the very first time today. Today will also likely be the last time I'll listen to Vaughan Williams. ********************** Barry Wordsworth and the New Queen's Hall Orchestra Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) Orchestral Works: Fantasia on Greensleeves; Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis; Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1; In the Fen Country Argo/Decca, 1994 ********************** Among England's best known and best regarded composers, Vaughan Williams follows a long line of European classical music composers (Brahms, Liszt, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Borodin) who were inspired and influenced by folk music from their native countries. However, here is the challenge for me with Vaughan Williams' music: it is simply too rich. Too rich with emotion, too rich in orchestration, too rich in sickly-sweet major keys, too rich in swelling chords and too rich with melodrama. If you are a music composer and you want your listeners to experience st...

Many classical music writers seem to want to group Beethoven's Eighth symphony together with his Sixth (the "Pastoral") and his Seventh symphonies. Perhaps it's because there are some musical traits common to all three works (peasant dance themes, for example), or perhaps it's because he wrote the Seventh and Eighth symphonies at the same time and the Sixth just a few years before that. Or maybe it's just that these symphonies are afterthoughts, grouped together arbitrarily by virtue of the fact that they are bracketed by the Fifth and the Ninth symphonies, works that are of such importance in the world of classical music that they dwarf nearly everything else Beethoven wrote. Let's never make the mistake of overlooking Beethoven's "overlooked" symphonies. ********************** Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Beethoven (1770-1827) Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 8 / Fidelio Overture Deutsche Grammophon, 1977 ******************...

I know that the readers of this blog don't often mingle with the readers of my food blog, but I thought I would just put in a brief mention here of a post on how to avoid holiday overeating that I've written over at Casual Kitchen. 15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating Enjoy--and happy holidays!

"Beethoven brought three startling innovations to music: first, he altered our very conception of the art by emphasizing the psychological element implicit in the language of sounds. Secondly, his own stormy and explosive temperament was, in part, responsible for a dramatization of the whole art of music.... Both of these elements--the psychological orientation and the instinct for drama--are inextricably linked in my mind with his third and possibly most original achievement: the creation of musical forms dynamically conceived on a scale never before attempted and of an inevitability that is irresistible." --Aaron Copeland, from David Dubal's The Essential Canon of Classical Music We return to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to give a close listen to an alternate performance of this exceptional classical music. ********************** Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Beethoven (1770-1827) Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 8 / Fidelio Overture Deutsche Grammopho...

"Paganini's music is virtuosic for the sake of virtuosity," a relative of mine, a professional viola player, once said, "and it has no musical substance whatsoever." We return to Paganini's 24 Caprices to hear the renowned violin prodigy Midori try to tackle these preposterously difficult works. ********************** Midori, violin (b: 1971) Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840) Paganini: 24 Caprices Sony Classical, 1989 ********************** When I listened a month ago to Michael Rabin trying his best to play the Caprices, it was immediately obvious, even to me as a non-violinist, that these works are so technically challenging that even world-class musicians cannot play them cleanly. Midori, however, with her ferocious technical prowess, attacks these works with more success and better results than Michael Rabin. She may not sound entirely effortless, but she gets these notoriously difficult exercises done with a relatively minimal number of stray and off-key no...

The Eighth Symphony was the last symphony Bruckner completed, and it will be the final Bruckner symphony covered in this blog. We've already written about his First , Fourth and Seventh Symphonies. ********************** Herbert Von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmoniker Felix Mendelssohn (1824-1896) Anton Bruckner: Symphony No.8 Deutsche Grammophon, 1989 ********************** Bruckner was 59 when he began work on this symphony, but rather than being at the height of his powers at this stage of his life, he was in many ways at the height of his personal insecurity. Unsure of himself, he was prone to accept the suggestions of his fellow musicians, some of them made in less than admiring spirit, some well-intentioned but not always perceptive... which a more self-confident man might have rejected. --John Warrack, in an unusually well-written CD liner note. In 1887, Bruckner thought he had finished this symphony after roughly three years of work, but when he sent the score to t...