Extremely annoying pieces of classical music

[Cellini]

Deserving contempt?

(I will pass over in silence the jibe about cellists not practising, treating it with the contempt it deserves. That's violists )

Oh dear Uncle Monty, you are misinformed. I'm a fiddler, don't you know. So I can be superior about cellists, who on the whole I don't mind at all, even when they don't practise. (Well, they have such easy parts, they don't need to after all!!)

But in one quartet I play in I have the most trouble with the cellist, as she thinks you can play Mozart quartets in a disinterested way. I'm suggesting Bartok next, all the six quartets in one concert! That will learn her! Follow that Takacs ... :cool2:

[rauschwerk]

O
Anyone else got any bugbear pieces?

Howard Skempton's Lento. One particular progression (Dm, Cm, Gm, all in root position) comes back about a thousand times in the same rhythm and makes me want to scream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT4arTGagPs

[Suffolkcoastal]

Interesting hit-list, SC!

I believe we are both devotees of RVW, for whose music and person, as you know, my love is boundless and unconditional! But I think I'll have to register a disagreement about Mahler. It hasn't been a quick conversion, but I am firming up on the belief that Mahler 3 (along perhaps with Bruckner 9) is the greatest work in the symphonic repertoire. But I guess neither will ever be everyone's cup of tea.

Also I've enjoyed Nyman a lot over the years. I already had a pretty intimate knowledge of the kinds of works he drew on for his own compositions, e.g. Purcell, and so he was really pushing at an open door in my case. I know his harmonic progressions are not the subtlest, but I find them strangely satisfying.

I used to like Mahler a bit Uncle Monty, but in the last 15 or so years I'm afraid with the partial excetion of the 6th & 9th symphonies and some of the songs, I've gone completely off him. It is actually the 3rd symphony that really began to put me off, it just bored me rigid, nothing seems to ever happen and the time it finishes I felt like I've gone on a 400 mile detour when I've only wished to travel 20 miles and even after the diversion I've ended up in completely the wrong place. As for Nyman, sorry that's a major no-go area. I like Bruckner though and love the 9th symphony (my favourite though is no 5 with its awe inspiring finale), so at least we've something to agree on there!

[Uncle Monty]

Oh dear Uncle Monty, you are misinformed. I'm a fiddler, don't you know. So I can be superior about cellists, who on the whole I don't mind at all, even when they don't practise. (Well, they have such easy parts, they don't need to after all!!)

But in one quartet I play in I have the most trouble with the cellist, as she thinks you can play Mozart quartets in a disinterested way. I'm suggesting Bartok next, all the six quartets in one concert! That will learn her! Follow that Takacs ... :cool2:

Ha ha, no, I was suggesting that it was viola parts that were so undemanding that little or no practice is necessary

Seriously, though, I would like to place on record that cellists think violas are wonderful -- when you're sitting in the strings you can really hear the violas knitting everything together

Since you raise Mozart, I was hesitating to say this on the thread about R3's Total Immersion season, but I will anyway -- I don't think Mozart had any interest in cellos, and the parts are usually pretty boring to play. The way I think of it is that it's a bloody good job the music sounds so wonderful

[3rd Viennese School]

Okay. Here goes.

Barber Adagio for strings
Tchaikovsky Nutcracker / Swan lake. Only when it’s being played out of context on adverts

Elgar Symphony no.2
Elgar Cocaine in London town
Elgar Nimrod
Elgar

Britten Simple symphony

Haydn Symphony no.101 mvt 1 1st subject
Haydn Symphony no.94 mvt 2

[Mr Pee]

Elgar Symphony no.2
Elgar Cocaigne in London town
Elgar Nimrod
Elgar

Nooooooo!!!! (Again.)

OK, I have thought of another:-

Anything from the second Viennese school. ( I didn't know there was a 3rd, but I'd probably find that profoundly irritating as well.....)

[3rd Viennese School]

I'm only answering the question! Which pieces of classical music do you find annoying? I'm not going to write down the works I like!
3VS

[vinteuil]

OK festivities over, Christmas tree fairies are back in the cupboard... How about a few "bêtes noires"? I've just been listening to the French "Tribune des Critiques" programme about The Nutcracker, and I realise that my list of REALLY annoying pieces has three items vying for top spot:

1= Tchaikovsky "Nutcracker" - Pas de Deux.. That ruddy downward scale repeated ad nauseam, louder and louder (ffff by the end )

1= Tchaikovsky "Tatiana's Letter" scene, Eugene Onegin (have avoided it sufficiently long to forget what it sounds like)

1= Liszt "Les Préludes"

Anyone else got any bugbear pieces? (I expect "Bolero" to feature strongly - though I rather like it, in the right hands)

Happy New Year all

Good to find many of my pet hates in the comments above -

Tchaikovsky
Orff
Khatchaturian
Rimsky-Korsakov
Bruch
Elgar

to which I would add

Respighi
Weill
Vaughan Williams
Shostakovitch
Stravinsky

But on the other hand - unlike some - I love Berlioz and Rossini...

[Serial_Apologist]

J.S. Bach's "Jesu Joy of man's Desiring" is my worst "bete noir": that chorale - Bach at his most unctious - and the way it is split between that irritating instrumental counter-theme.

Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" - in fact, anything by this composer that I have heard puts me right orff.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - the overlong, over-repetitive first movement; the equally repetitive fugal scherzo - in which LvanB repeats the similar error of overstatement in the scherzo & trio of the Seventh; the formal foul up of the finale - particularly the serious mistake of the diminuendo in the final bars of the first (?) repeat of the "famous" theme: what was Beethoven ON when he composed that???

Certainly agree with Rauschwerk's view re Souster's ultra-banal Adagio - a cheapskate "hommage" to Barber's?? I heard the broadcast premiere and immediately judged the piece the biggest musical con of all time. As time goes on I feel more and more this way about the "product" of the badly misnamed English Experimental school - Cardew possibly aside...

Most of Mendelssohn after the Hebrides Overture is pretty trite and nonedescript: can't think why Schumann, surely a much greater composer, thought so much of him.

Finally, Schoenberg's "Pelleas und Melisande", which surely outdoes even the worst and most bombastic of Strauss in Ein Heldenleben for claggy, glutinous orchestration. Strange, because I have huge respect and love for Schoenberg's music, apart from this one work.

S-A

[ahinton]

Certainly agree with Rauschwerk's view re Souster's ultra-banal Adagio - a cheapskate "hommage" to Barber's??

Except, of course, that the reference was to Howard Skempton, not Tim Souster and the piece in question is entitled Lento, not Adagio!
he biggest musical con of all time.

Most of Mendelssohn after the Hebrides Overture is pretty trite and nonedescript: can't think why Schumann, surely a much greater composer, thought so much of him.

Try the Op. 80 quartet, for starters...

Schoenberg's "Pelleas und Melisande", which surely outdoes even the worst and most bombastic of Strauss in Ein Heldenleben for claggy, glutinous orchestration. Strange, because I have huge respect and love for Schoenberg's music

As do I, but I can only assume that you've heard some uncommonly dreadful performances of both of these works if you have come away from each with an abiding impression of "claggy, glutinous orchestration", of which no part of either work is remotely guilty. I think that both works are marvels of orchestration among their many other virtues, although I'm not quite sure that I'd especially care to hear them both in the same programme! And anyway, "Schoenberg" was "Schönberg" at the time of its composition (and, given the extent of his failure to come to terms with settling in US, he might have been better off staying that way).

[Pianorak]

"Pelleas und Melisande"

Not Schoenberg's but the other one's. Have I ever been more bored that sitting through Debussy's "P&M" at Palais Garnier a few years ago? No! And I love Debussy's piano music.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks Ahinton - and good to see your post! - with apologies for my carelessness, which was due to my being inexplicably logged off the board, and worried about losing my place when I returned.

Yes - Lento by Skempton, of course, NOT Adagio or for that matter anything else by Tim Souster, for me much missed (RIP).

BTW can you (or anyone) recommend a GOOD recording of Pelleas und Melisande? My copy is the admittedly mono 1965 CBS version with the CBC under Craft, "liner notes" as it were by the composer, and his cover portrait by Kokoschka. Pretty definitive one might think, but one is always open to re-persuasion.

S-A

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Good to find many of my pet hates in the comments above -
But on the other hand - unlike some - I love Berlioz and Rossini...

So it really is a wind-up then!

[vinteuil]

So it really is a wind-up then!

"For a long time the music of Berlioz remained a sealed book to me. Each person comes to a particular composer in his or her own way and time; no rules govern the processes of musical discovery. But circumstances of cultural climate and environment may delay it. The more conditioned we are to the music we know, the more, unconsciously, we expect the unfamiliar to approximate to it. Bruckner's formal designs are usually incomprehensible, to begin with, to someone accustomed to Brahms's; and most people know Brahms's symphonies before they encounter Bruckner's. There are musicians and music-lovers who are drawn to Berlioz's music irresistibly and for whom its idiosyncrasies of style are no barrier; in their deepest being it sounds a note of instant recognition. To many others it seems alien when they first hear it and perhaps for long afterwards, as it did to me. I was brought up from the age of eight or nine in the German tradition: first Bach, then a few years later Beethoven, finally Brahms. Composers not squarely in that tradition were assimilated with difficulty at all. (Even Mozart seemed trivial.) I remember, one day when I was in my early twenties, my sister coming home in great excitement with a recording of the Fantastic Symphony that she had just heard. She insisted on my listening to it then and there. It made absolutely no sense to me.
Nearly ten years passed before anything occurred to change this attitude. [...] Gradually ... the barriers fell away and enlightenment dawned - until I realized with delight that the language which ten years before had been so much gibberish to my musical understanding had become familiar and made sense, thrilling, unimagined sense after all."

from the 'Prologue' to David Cairns: "Berlioz - The Making of an Artist"

[Op. XXXIX]

Elgar's Vesper Voluntaries - utterly soporific - it seems total madness to programme all twelve of them in the same recital, but I've heard it done twice - arrrgggghhhhh!

Oh dear...

Such delectable gems...