That One Special Piece

[NatBalance]

This has probably been asked before but I can't find it. It's that dreaded question at the end of Desert Island Discs … Come on, let's have it! Which one? Which one is absolute TOPS?

I tend to think that the answer to that question for most people will change over time. Ask them that question a year, perhaps even a month, later and their answer will be different, but I have realised that with me the answer to that question has not changed for decades. So that's what I am asking. Do you have a piece that has stood the test of time, a special piece, one you keep coming back to no matter how many times you hear it, it does things to you no other piece does ….. ooooo eur, steady on now Rich! It puts a tingle on your tingle


Doesn't have to be classical, and if you cannot pin it down to just one then so be it, but what I am not keen on is lists. I'm also interested in the reason. I realise that for some the reason may be difficult to relate, explaining why you like a piece of music, why it gives that extra tingle, could be like trying to explain why you like a piece of cake, but it would be nice if you could try.

Here's my piece and my attempt at explaining why:-

Neptune (from The Planets Suite) - Gustav Holst

I consider this the most remarkable piece of music ever written and it has the most profound effect on me. It gets deep down into my soul. Holst has a special way of using the celesta, harp, and female chorus.

Some of you will know the problem I have with the volume orchestral music is played. Most of the versions on YouTube are way too quiet so I've chosen Tomita's version for you to listen to while, or IF, you read any further:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K-NBH9Q-eo

(I vote we have more Tomita on Radio 3. I know his version of a Debussy piece was played recently, but that was a very rare outing as far as I know)

I am not religeous in the conventional sense but this piece I believe takes me to that special place that in religious people is filled by their beliefs. It's as if hidden within the notes of this wonderfull piece lie the answers to the mysteries of the universe. I am floating in outer space … at first it is cold ….. the mysteries out there are wonderous and they surround me … (Holst is the master of the celesta) but then comes the women's wordless chorus, and I don't know what it is about a female wordless chorus but it has the amazing ability to take the listener into the land of unanswered questions, the land of myths and legends, and in this case the whole universe, but they also bring WARMTH. There is warmth somewhere out there in the depths of space. The wordless chorus coming in at the end is like a cosy warm blanket of humanity that wraps around you. Holst was not the first to use the female wordless chorus to create such an effect. Who was the first? Does anyone know? Debussy? Ravel? It is such a piece that it leaves me with a feeling that NOTHING can follow Neptune … NOTHING!

Colin Matthew's Pluto is a great piece in itself, and it is a reasonable attempt at following Neptune, except that it is not done in Holst's style which I find very puzzling, but to follow Neptune is really an impossible task.

I have two complaints about Neptune though …. firstly it's not long enough, secondly the ending is never performed correctly. This was the first piece to have a fade out ending and I have never heard that fade out done properly, never on recordings or live performances. The point about the ending is that it is supposed to fade out until you cannot distinguish the point at which the music ends and the silence begins. The door to the back stage is supposed to be gradually closed and the choir (presumably in stocking feet) are supposed to walk away still singing until they cannot be heard. You are not supposed to hear the choir stop singing, but yet I always do. I have had to create my own version in Audacity.

If there are any other Neptune fans out there, this is an intersting one:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqkxJTPltuE

Absolutely fascinating that, but notice how soon they stop singing. What was the point in closing the doors if they're going to stop singing as soon as they're closed? Keep singing damn you!

Rich

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I have the VPO/ Karajan on LP, and the analogue fade-out is most effective. But on the CD transfer, there is indeed a point where it can be heard to stop. Digital silence does not work well.

[rauschwerk]

I'm afraid I can't resist countering a few points in your post. Firstly, a recording cannot be inherently 'too quiet' - you use your controls to make the volume realistic. Secondly, the sound quality on YouTube is fatally compromised. Thirdly, Holst judged the length of Neptune in its context and expected it to be heard and assessed in that setting - I believe he disapproved of movements from The Planets being performed alone.

That said, I have thought for many years that there are few experiences as satisfying as a really good performance of Brahms's fourth symphony, because for me it offers an ideal combination of the intellectual and the emotional.

[NatBalance]

I have the VPO/ Karajan on LP, and the analogue fade-out is most effective. But on the CD transfer, there is indeed a point where it can be heard to stop. Digital silence does not work well.

It's as if they are in a rush to finish. Look at the conductor in the video I linked rushing them to close the doors quickly. I mean, does he have a bus to catch or something? This is music, this is art, not a task to be got done.

I'm afraid I can't resist countering a few points in your post. Firstly, a recording cannot be inherently 'too quiet' - you use your controls to make the volume realistic. Secondly, the sound quality on YouTube is fatally compromised. Thirdly, Holst judged the length of Neptune in its context and expected it to be heard and assessed in that setting - I believe he disapproved of movements from The Planets being performed alone.

Oh I am not saying it is not long enough as part of The Planets suite. I am just trying to say that I love it so much there is just not enough of it. It is of course a perfect length as part of the suite but I think, like with the adagio from Barber's string quartet (and Borodin's), it is such a great piece that it deserves more. Separating movements from their context is always a difficult one but when certain movements are outstanding I think it is right to make the most of them.

As for "… a recording cannot be inherently 'too quiet' …" I fear going down the road of explaining what I mean by that as it has been discussed before on some other threads of mine and I reckon that is best left to a thread all its own.

[richardfinegold]

I have the VPO/ Karajan on LP, and the analogue fade-out is most effective. But on the CD transfer, there is indeed a point where it can be heard to stop. Digital silence does not work well.

The fault would be more with an insensitive transfer, and not necessarily with digital technology

[kea]

My deeply considered, well-reasoned choice of "favourite individual movement in music" would change every day. But the answer my instincts jump to immediately almost always seems to be the Arietta from Beethoven's Op. 111. Music that begins on the threshold of silence, moves through the wildest joy to the deepest abyss and ends in the profoundest transfiguration of anything I can think of.

Choosing an entire piece (let alone an entire CD) is more difficult and doesn't have a ready answer. I'd have to think a bit more!

[Barbirollians]

ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen - sung of course by Kathleen Ferrier with the VPO/Walter

[Serial_Apologist]

As with kea (above) my choice would change from day to day, or even morning to evening, dependent on mood and listening capacity that day. But if pushed it would have to be Debussy's Jeux. Why? Well on this topic I think Boulez is right to view Debussy as the first modernist composer, and this piece episomises several aspects of musical modernism that obviously have been taken much further, but here the composer and his music are at a tantalising kind of cross roads, between diatonic-centred directioning and atonality, continuity and discontinuity, melody and athematicism, and scoring-wise both opulent and at the same time on the threshold of new kinds of pointillism which others would take further. It is also idiomatically richly inclusive, to degrees only subsequent composers of more conservative stamp (Prokofiev or Honegger for example) succeeded in being; one had to await today's Neos and post-Minimalists to find that aspect of musical possibility being reinvestigated because the whole necessary project of modernism thereafter involved idiomatic narrowing down before the lessons learned in terms of uncovering previously unknown areas of expression through abstraction had taken their course. There are other less tangible reasons why I love this work, such as its evocativeness, which however of course it shares with a good deal of Impressionist music.

[ahinton]

Such a Desert Island choice would be beyond impossible for me; as a record producer I know once said in my hearing, "I wouldn't want to be invited onto that programme because I'd never be able to narrow my choices down to a mere 80,000 discs"...

[Stanfordian]

My one piece for the Desert Island is:

Mahler 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen' - sung by Magdalena Kožená with Berliner Philharmoniker under Sir Simon Rattle.

[pastoralguy]

I have the VPO/ Karajan on LP, and the analogue fade-out is most effective. But on the CD transfer, there is indeed a point where it can be heard to stop. Digital silence does not work well.

What's equally important is that there is enough 'run off' time before the CD player stops and makes a sound. Some companies are better at it than others. And don't get me started on discs where there is insufficient space between works!

[Beef Oven!]

What's equally important is that there is enough 'run off' time before the CD player stops and makes a sound. Some companies are better at it than others. And don't get me started on discs where there is insufficient space between works!

All discs have insufficient space between movements and works.

My first CD player was a Technics and it had facility called 'autocue'. Basically, with this on, the first movement would play and then go into pause at the end. You could then decide when to press play again and continue. That was about 27 years ago, and I still miss that function.

[Serial_Apologist]

All discs have insufficient space between movements and works.

My first CD player was a Technics and it had facility called 'autocue'. Basically, with this on, the first movement would play and then go into pause at the end. You could then decide when to press play again and continue. That was about 27 years ago, and I still miss that function.

Progress, by any other name.

[pastoralguy]

All discs have insufficient space between movements and works.

My first CD player was a Technics and it had facility called 'autocue'. Basically, with this on, the first movement would play and then go into pause at the end. You could then decide when to press play again and continue. That was about 27 years ago, and I still miss that function.

My first CD player, a top of the range Sony, (I'd just received a very large and unexpected tax rebate!), had a facility where one could programme different lengths of time between tracks. At first, I thought it was a gimmick but it did come in very handy sometimes. My current CD player, a Quad 'Elite' doesn't even have a shuffle facility!

[Petrushka]

Back on topic. There are two works that qualify for being 'that one special piece' for me{ Beethoven's Choral and Mahler's Resurrection. I have more recordings of both of these than any other in my collection. It's now near 60 of the Beethoven and 40 of the Mahler and both have been a major part of my life since I was 16/17.