101 Classical Music CDs

If there was a golden age for classical music, it certainly wasn't any time during the past fifty years. In many ways, classical music has lost its way in our current cultural landscape. We've seen the Columbus Symphony close down and the San Antonio Symphony declare bankruptcy (admittedly both have re-emerged, but with truncated seasons and musicians working for lower pay). Thanks to our current economic straits, it's highly plausible that in the next few years we will see a number of other symphony orchestras either close down or significantly reduce their size and scope. The key to the long-term sustainability of any art form is the quality, dynamism and impact of its new works. Unfortunately, that's where classical music is struggling most of all. Quick, name three classical music composers who published something in the last ten years. Uh, okay, name two? One? Symphony orchestras all around the world have been subsisting on the crowd favorites like Beethoven, Moza...

What is so-called originality, so-called novelty? It isn't the most important thing. The most important thing is truth of feeling. --Edvard Grieg Grieg wrote a total of 66 lyric pieces for piano, and our pianist, Emil Gilels, chose the twenty works featured on this disc himself. It's refreshing to hear these beautiful works for solo piano played so lovingly, beautifully and with such perfection. This is the kind of classical music CD you'll listen to joyfully for decades. ********************** Emil Gilels, piano Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) Grieg: Lyric Pieces (Lyrische Stücke), performed by Emil Gilels Deutsche Grammophon/Polydor, 1974 ********************** It's a pleasure to hear a CD of passionate music performed by a pianist who actually cares about the recording he was making, and it's a particularly stark contrast from our last CD of piano music grudgingly performed by Glenn Gould. Before we get to the listener notes, I'd like to make a brief point about tw...

Today we listen to possibly the most mediocre CD in my entire classical music collection, Glenn Gould's recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. ********************** Glenn Gould, piano Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II Sony Classical, 1971/1993 ********************** It would take a nearly a century for his ideas to catch on, but aspects of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier would eventually come to revolutionize Western music. With this work, Bach promoted a new way of tuning keyboard instruments, using a twelve-tone chromatic system rather than the " meantone " system that predominated at the time. Furthermore, this enormous collection of preludes and fugues heavily influenced composers--including giants like Beethoven and Mozart--for hundreds of years to come, as it established some of the key ground rules for ha...

With today's CD we make a move into the modern era to listen to some of Ottorino Respighi's best known works: Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals. These three works, the so-called "Roman Trilogy," were all written in the 20th century, but they are all throwback works that sound like they came from the mid-1900s. And this may sound harsh, but all three of them are largely forgettable. ********************** Guisepe Sinopoli and the New York Philharmonic Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) Fontane Di Roma, Pini Di Roma, Feste Romane Deutsche Grammophon, 1993 ********************** One of the common factoids you'll see when reading about Respighi is that he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov during a visit to Russia in 1900-1901, and learned many secrets of orchestration from him. You can also feel the influence of other symphonic "imagists" like Ravel and Debussy in Respighi's music. You'll never find Respighi sitting among the true gods of cl...