Composers whose music means more to you as the years go by

[Serial_Apologist]

In case Bryn and Mr GG don't know about them, here are two audio links to Feldman speaking:
a great 1986 interview here...

https://archive.org/details/MFeldmanSOM

...and here Feldman talking with Cage:
http://archive.org/details/CageFeldmanConversation1

Phew! Well discovered Boilk, and many thanks.

[teamsaint]

Re # 21

Thanks for the links Gurnemanz - if only my mostly forgotten O-Level German (1981) could do the DFD book justice :-(

(What a polymath he was )

I've added the Brilliant Classics set to my Amazon Wish List !

Best Wishes,

Tevot

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brahms-Choral-Works-6CD-ROM/dp/B005JWX7KE/ref=sr_1_7?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1363989594&sr=1-7

I have plugged this set more than once Tevot/Gurney, but if you don't know the material some of it is available to sample on youtube.
Some of it is pure gold, and there are translations here:

http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=9664

Apologies if you know this stuff already.

Edit: to say that some of the lyrics are Romantic is an understatement. A cold winter afternoon spent enjoying these words (in translation) and music, is a lot of fun.

[teamsaint]

It would have to be Robert Schumann.

Coming back in via the stunning Violin Sonatas (Oh, I'd bought them, but never really listened), then the Quartets and Trios, then the Symphonies once more after stumbling upon the Ceccato/Bergen PO Mahler arrangements, so fresh and alert! Currently much taken with Dausgaard's SCO BIS survey of the orchestral music... BIS has served this composer remarkably well.

Schumann is especially lucky with the variety of interpretative approaches now on record, and I'm lucky to feel such a temperamental affinity with his art. I just wish there was a little more of it!

In the absence of a local evening class on RS, I am trying to discover all of his secrets for myself.

As Victoria Wood said..." Hard work, but lots of fun".

[Petrushka]

Mahler has been an ever constant presence in my life for 40 years now. It's actually 40 years ago on April 9 since I bought my first Resurrection (Haitink/Concertgebouw) and I never tire of listening to the symphonies.

However, the composer whom I discovered at about the same time is the one who means more and more to me as I get older and that is Anton Bruckner.

In addition, I am finding more and more in Beethoven, play much more Brahms than I once did and after so many abortive attempts am finally getting to grips with the organ works of J S Bach (on CD only, I should make clear, not in the organ loft!). I now feel ready for them.

[Thropplenoggin]

In case Bryn and Mr GG don't know about them, here are two audio links to Feldman speaking:
a great 1986 interview here...
https://archive.org/details/MFeldmanSOM

This is one of most hypnotically brilliant, witty, intelligent, thoughtful interview-cum-lectures I've ever heard. Merci bien, Boilk. A brilliant mind allowed to speak at length (with a great accent "Bur-yud" for Byrd, etc.) Talk about the lost art of the interview, where the interviewer has become more important than the interviewee.

[aeolium]

so I may be reduced to exploring the barque

Speaking of the barque, the composer that means more to me as I get older and is a source of endless delight, discovery and rediscovery, is Handel. I came to be interested in his music relatively late in life since in the late 1960s and 1970s when I was getting to know classical music there seemed relatively few works of Handel that were widely performed and those generally warhorses: Messiah, Water & Fireworks music, popular pieces like Zadok, Ombra, Sheba etc etc. It was only with the rediscovery of the operas, and subsequently the more obscure oratorios and other secular and sacred music - and thanks largely to the Early Music movement - that the real glories of his music came to be revealed. The problem was that after the veneration of his work in the Classical age, particularly by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, it suffered a long eclipse in the Romantic era which largely continued well into the C20 (the 2nd Viennese School being largely interested in Bach not Handel). Only in recent years has it been possible to see Handel's tremendous versatility. his ability to write music for the grandest and most private occasions, for every available instrument and voice (including a type of voice no longer available) and with choral writing as powerful as that by any composer. The one area of his output that has yet to be properly explored imo (apart from a few recordings) is the chamber music, and I look forward to new discoveries here.

What aroused me to investigate this composer's music again was reading in Thayer's Life of Beethoven the account of the old composer getting off his sickbed to bend his knee to the spirit of Handel. I wanted to know why Beethoven prized this music more highly than that of Haydn, Mozart, Bach. The more I have listened to the music the more I have come to understand something of what lay behind Beethoven's admiration.

[JFLL]

Speaking of the barque, the composer that means more to me as I get older and is a source of endless delight, discovery and rediscovery, is Handel. .....

Interesting, aeolium. I know Handel is very much admired today, but I have a completely blind spot there, and it’s not because I don’t like all the music of that period, because I love Bach’s cantatas, for example.* I’m probably missing a great deal, but I just haven’t yet found a way of getting into the music. For me, it just doesn’t have the edge that Bach’s (or Purcell's) music does.

* Speaking of which, I received today Gardiner’s CD of the Bach Ascension Cantatas (11, 37, 43, 128) which they recorded last year as a pendant to their main SDG Bach Pilgrimage series. (Still the same weird covers, btw, this time what looks like an Afghan tribesman.)

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting, aeolium. I know Handel is very much admired today, but I have a completely blind spot there, and it’s not because I don’t like all the music of that period, because I love Bach’s cantatas, for example.* I’m probably missing a great deal, but I just haven’t yet found a way of getting into the music. For me, it just doesn’t have the edge that Bach’s (or Purcell's) music does.

I'm much the same with GFH: pleasant but ungripping - but at least his music is always instantly recogniseable as being his, unlike that of so many of his contemporaries.

[Ferretfancy]

I once asked a shop assistant why there was so much Handel on the shelves, particularly the operas. He replied that it presented a challenge to performers, but none to listeners.

[amateur51]

I once asked a shop assistant why there was so much Handel on the shelves, particularly the operas. He replied that it presented a challenge to performers, but none to listeners.

Ouch!

[aeolium]

I once asked a shop assistant why there was so much Handel on the shelves, particularly the operas. He replied that it presented a challenge to performers, but none to listeners.

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven obviously disagreed

[pastoralguy]

What an interesting thread!

Bach's keyboard music has been a tremendous discovery for me these last couple of years. I bought the complete Angela Hewitt set and I listen to it
often.

Elgar has always been a great favourite of mine but I seem to have lost the habit.

[Beef Oven]

Schumann. Year on year he grows on me.

Great thread!

[Serial_Apologist]

What an interesting thread!

Bach's keyboard music has been a tremendous discovery for me these last couple of years. I bought the complete Angela Hewitt set and I listen to it
often.

Elgar has always been a great favourite of mine but I seem to have lost the habit.

You don't need to be a monk to enjoy Elgar, PG - notwithstanding what some are said to feel about Gerontius

[Suffolkcoastal]

The composers whose music I have loved for many years, have in many cases meant even more to me, composers such as Vaughan Williams, Holst, Harris, Copland, and I don't think I will ever tire of their music. Certain composers whose music I have always enjoyed have also grown on me still further, Bax, Martinu, Piston, Sibelius, Diamond, Moeran & W Schuman for example. I have also learnt to admire and appreciate composers I've always like but taken for granted, such as Haydn, Puccini, Bartok & Mendelssohn, and my appreciation of Brahms's chamber music and Schubert's piano music has grown appreciably. There is so much music to appreciate and we are so very lucky to have the opportunity to hear it all.
I'm still recovering from a shock last evening when listening to Richard Rodney Bennett's rather astringent 1st Symphony as part of my symphonic journey on my headphones, and my partner, whose musical appreciation is mainly dance/chart music orientated could hear it as my headphones must have been up quite high, and said that he wanted to hear it properly. Imagine my shock when he liked this quite demanding and dissonant music, so I played him Copland's serial Inscape and he really like that too. Peoples musical appreciation and taste can surprise us all even when we think we know them really well!