What are your 'Comfort blanket' works...?

[pastoralguy]

I've alluded to the fact that my work situation has been pretty unbearable recently due to a 'clique' of what I must, in the spirit of the season, call 'collegues' going out of their way to be as obnoxious as possible. More and more, I found that rather than sit in the staff room, I would sit in the car and put a cd on. Although I tried various works, it was always Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto that I would end up playing. It had the advantage that the first movement lasts about 18 minutes which gave me enough time to make tea and purchase whatever gourmet offerings were available from the canteen before settling down behind the wheel with one of the MANY recordings I've acquired over my 30 years of cd collecting! I found that it always turned my low mood into something a bit more positive.

I think my affection comes from the fact that it was one of the first pieces I ever wanted to play and although, I was never likely to perform it with an orchestra, I used to find that it was a good barometer of my progress since I'd dig it out every summer and would find I could manage a bit more than the previous year.

Anyway, I suppose my question is what works do you turn to in moments of stress?

[french frank]

Not so much stress as feeling I want to focus on something to divert my attention from some irritatingly recurring thought/situation: JSB's Art of Fugue.

[Richard Tarleton]

Sorry to hear this pastoralguy - presumably all available options explored/exhausted? (HR, etc.)

But: like ff, JSB, only Goldberg - harpsichord or piano. The Aria brings about immediate sense of calm.

[pastoralguy]

Sorry to hear this pastoralguy - presumably all available options explored/exhausted? (HR, etc.)

But: like ff, JSB, only Goldberg - harpsichord or piano. The Aria brings about immediate sense of calm.

Thank you. HR are part of the problem...

[Nick Armstrong]

like ff, JSB, only Goldberg

This is a good article by Jeremy Denk. I love his performance of the Goldbergs (and I love the use of the piece in Silence of the Lambs, although that has somewhat killed it as a 'comfort blanket' work for me... Don't watch the film if you don't know what I mean).

[aeolium]

I find there is so much of Haydn's music that is comforting in its sanity, wisdom, humanity and often sheer good humour, especially some of the later string quartets, the Lark op 64 no 5, op 76 no 6 and his last completed quartet op 77 no 2. Mozart piano concertos are also very effective, as is the Schubert B flat piano trio with the healing balm of its slow movement.

[teamsaint]

Schumann . Spring Symphony. Redefines " uplifting".

Beethoven.Pastoral Sonata.

Or I might just wrap myself in Schubert for as long as is needed.

I do hope things improve very soon, PG.

[Serial_Apologist]

Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music

[Madame Suggia]

A recent-ish discovery

Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks

[Simon B]

For various personal (i.e. non work) reasons I've sought my own answer to this question over several extended periods during 2015 (which I will be glad to see the back of).

There have been times when the answer is - nothing. All music either irritated or seemed cloying or just too much. I believe this is a common experience, but I found this in itself distressing.

There were other times where the answer surprised me. Works like Shostakovich's 8th symphony, precisely the kind of thing I would have thought to avoid, offered... if not exactly solace, something. State of mind reflected in music perhaps?

For a more usual definition of comfort, when I was in the right frame of mind for it, there was a clear choice: RVW's 5th Symphony. Nothing can really touch it in that respect. Perhaps it is flirting with grandiosity to use a word like "benediction", but...

I hope the necessity of the "nothing" option doesn't return.

[Beef Oven!]

beethoven - hammerklavier. always has been.

[Roehre]

Adagio Mahler 10, ever since a dentist treatment in 1975 my Comfort Blanket, both listening in my head or physically as LP or CD.

[Roslynmuse]

For various personal (i.e. non work) reasons I've sought my own answer to this question over several extended periods during 2015 (which I will be glad to see the back of).

There have been times when the answer is - nothing. All music either irritated or seemed cloying or just too much. I believe this is a common experience, but I found this in itself distressing.

There were other times where the answer surprised me. Works like Shostakovich's 8th symphony, precisely the kind of thing I would have thought to avoid, offered... if not exactly solace, something. State of mind reflected in music perhaps?

For a more usual definition of comfort, when I was in the right frame of mind for it, there was a clear choice: RVW's 5th Symphony. Nothing can really touch it in that respect. Perhaps it is flirting with grandiosity to use a word like "benediction", but...

I hope the necessity of the "nothing" option doesn't return.

This has been very much my experience too these last couple of months - I had a period of not being able to listen to anything at all. And, unexpectedly, it has been the music of Sibelius that I have been listening to, quite obsessively, in the last couple of weeks. I've always liked Sibelius, with the 4th, 5th and 7th Symphonies desert island choices, but I have found so much in some of the pieces I knew less well, or not at all, Luonnotar, The Bard, Oceanides, Night Ride and Sunrise, The Tempest, movements from Pelleas, Swanwhite and Belshazzar's Feast. The 'state of mind reflected in the music' seems to me exactly the right phrase.

Ordinarily I would turn to Bach for sanity, Haydn for humanity, Chopin and Ravel for the sheer joy that music can bring. And Tippett's Midsummer Marriage for life-affirming energy.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

That's easy. Beethoven's 9th, following the Penguin score I bought in 1963. Its length and complex working out of materials help to sort out the mind.
I've never found any work better suited to sorting out the troubled mind than this one.

[MrGongGong]

4:33"

Nothing else needed