Anybody ever heard of a pianist by this name? I heard him play on my car radio once. Have searched for him, no luck.

Mindy

Love the Fox fanfare also. I make everyone in the room be quiet for it. I miss the longer version when they play the new, truncated one.

Mindy

Alfred Newman's "20th Century Fox Fanfare". 25 seconds of pure majesty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTgRm6Qgscc 

Tosselli's Serenade as performed by Andre Rieux.

Yes Brahms Symphony No 3 is one of my favourites (and relatively easy to play)...love the 1st, 3rd (the slow one most associated with Brahms), and 4th (which opens like a quiet mouse and builds from there) movement.

Brahms Symphony No 4 always been attractive, esp. the wonderfully disparate variations of the 4th movement.

Both piano concertos are fab, I esp. like Concerto No 1 first movement (opening in D minor roll then immediatly launching into B flat maj, and recapitulation is clever), and Concerto No 2 third (slow movement with cello) and fourth has to be one of the best finales ever!!!)

Violin concerto enjoyably melodic.
Choral song Nanie is great too.

On the other hand...

Brahms No 1 was a nightmare to play (first movement is in 3/8 or something like that, you see a crotchet rest and count 1 and play but actually meant to count 1-2).

Not a big fan of the double violin & cello concerto, although slow moment (violin and cello playing together in octaves) is ingenious by its simplicity.

other than the 2nd mvt of Sibelius' Violin Concerto, is The Swan of Tuonela from Lemminkainen Suite, Op. 22, No. 3.  That is quite gorgeous and even may make me look hypocritical in saying so, and the best I can say about my dislikes is that I generally am not a fan of programme music, or tone poems.  The disliking of his symphonies and later music still stands true.

This is more in reference to his symphonies.  However in saying that I find the first movement of the violin concerto fragmented, simply like he had too many ideas, and couldn't develop them properly.  The second movement is gorgeous.  The third movement I can take it or leave it.

As has been made clear many times, the works you mention are incontestably great. I have the Heifetz on LP (meaning PC has it) and Anne-Sophie Mutter on CD. Superb! It's the symphonies that are rubbish. Pretentious, pompous, directionless pomo-rubbish.

I do wish folk would pick up on the "value-swoon" concept.

Linz

His violin concerto is one of the best of the 20th century (in my opinion more melodic than Elgar's violin concerto) - I have the Jascha Heifetz version with Thomas Beecham conducting the London Philharmonic.

Perhaps those who don't like him explain what is wrong with each of the three movements in the concerto?

Also the Finlandia overture and the Karelia Suite (particularly the wonderful opening Intermezzo and final Alla Marcia) seem be "popular" orchestra pieces [implying that they would not be popular if they were not melodic].

Don't forget that Sibelius, at great risk to himself, tried to garner local and international support for an independent Finland during the 1900s [while his colleagues and associates were being deported to Siberia]...and anecdotally it was said that even during the later Russo-Finnish war in 1939-40 he took to taking potshots at attacking Russian aircraft using his hunting rifle.

P.S. Tchai is tea, but tchaikov is "seagull"! Apparently Sibelius translates from Swedish as "falcon"...

And through indignation I may get Lance to an opera yet.  As for an orchestral concert?  He has never even come and see me perform, other than MD and piano for a show.

Wifey, wifey, wifey. How could say such a thing? After you promised to teach me to listen to music "properly". You know I set great store by Lindsay's opinion, and on that basis there may be something in this "opera" and "classical" guff after all.

Or are you referring to the bus load of teenage girls?

The ten teenage girls I am taking may wonder who you are.  The youth of today ...

Usually I just listen to highlights. I quite agree that for the whole load, one should be at a live performance. That said, I don't attend local ones, since I usually end up walking out.

So you're coming down for Turandot? With Lance? Either way, you'd better look me up!!

In the fondest of ways I dub thee an 'opera geek'.  I have always enjoyed opera but I am not one to sit and argue over recordings.  Florence Foster Jenkins is about as far as I get for recommending an opera buffa recording, or buffoon is this case.  For me opera is something to experience live, individual arias occasionally make my playlist but it is rare.  Recordings capture only part of the performance, the rest is best viewed live where the air vibrates, faces emote, costumes dazzle and sets generally underwhelm.  There is nothing like a live performer in front of you to make you feel ... well feel anything, even it is nerves and sympathy for their mistakes.

I'll never make it to geek status in this art form.  However I am looking forward to my annual trip to the opera, Turandot in a fortnight.

I've often thought how great it would be for an Objectivist to compose the equivalent of a Mass—a hymn to man and achievement instead of God and suffering. But let's not forget that Puccini already did it, with the music to his Messa di Gloria. It's the most man-worshipping, life-celebrating music you ever heard, written by Puccini when he was barely out of his teens. We just need to change the lyrics.

The Credo. Oh boy! Wish you could all be hearing it with me now. Yup. We'll just change the lyrics to those of SOLO's Credo!!

... would pick the least characteristic of Puccini's operas and proceed to argue as though it were typical.

Actually, Fanciulla is rich man's Wagner. It "meanders," yes, but with heights of lyricism that would nearly equal Wagner's best, and without that infernal, goddam endless directionless droning. Certainly not a "dog's breakfast"—it's highly disciplined and exquisitely contrived. The scoring of the scene where Minnie cheats at cards and wins her man, as well as the finale, is music drama at its very best. Lots of value-swoons to be had.

This is an opera where you can't just hang around waiting for "tunes"—ya gotta follow the script.

Linz

PS—Erik: composers today I would rate? Not to say there aren't any, but none I'm aware of or pay attention to. Andrew Lloyd Webber is about the best melodist around—poor man's Puccini, really.

PPS—The opposite of "value-swoon" I suppose would be anti-value drool. Perfect example on last night's TV News: brainless headbanging caterwauling-addicted-and-addled louts who've been making a nuisance of themselves at some public place in Christchurch. The usual tactics—arresting them, etc.—didn't succeed in deterring these gum-chewing low-lifes from congregating there and menacing civilised organisms. The Council has installed a machine that plays Beethoven, loudly. Know what? No low-lifes to be seen!! Now, there's an anti-value drool by the low-lifes, who recognise value-opposition when they hear it!

I've just sat through Puccini's 'Girl of the Golden West' for yet another time, and I have to report that never has the description of meandering unmelodious drivel been so richly deserved.

I would take any of Wotan's interminable monologues over almost all of this dog's breakfast.

Cheers, Peter Cresswell

* * * *

'NOT PC.'
**Setting Brushfires In People's Minds**

ORGANON ARCHITECTURE
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I keep finding little pieces of music that remind me of John Williams, or not so little in the case of Dvorak's Symphony No.9.  He is very adept at 'recycling' musical ideas.  Most lovers of movie music have turned their attentions to Hans Zimmer of 'Gladiator' and 'Pirates of the Caribbean' fame.

...do you recommend any composers who are still alive? I really enjoy John Williams works, but who else is there?

I see I took the wrong end of the sentimental stick.

Yes, the "value-swoon." Lovely way of coining it.

I guess I think of sentimentality in the negative sense - overly or excessively responding to emotionalism rather than to true passion.

I should say that by "sentimentality" I don't mean the phony, mawkish emotionalism that folk often take the term to mean. I mean what I'd call an habitual state of "value-swoon" in response to something noble and uplifting—an actual spectacle or memory thereof.

Interestingly, my dictionary gives both definitions of "sentimental"—"tending to indulge the emotions excessively"; "making a direct appeal to the emotions, esp. to romantic feelings." The latter, of course, is what music does, so anti-sentimentality is silly on its face.

This authentic kind of sentimentality is manifest in the standard physical responses of hair standing on end, tears, goosebumps and the like. I can't imagine anyone who's tone-deaf or miswired in the way I'm talking about having these responses to music, since its language—melody and harmony—is unintelligible to them. I suspect the emotional "touch" you ask about is simply a response to loud noise with a beat, since the beat they CAN grasp.

Of course, those who have sentimentality but repress/reject it should liberate it at once.

... and any old meandering drivel seems "melodious" to them, and they'll report it as emotionally "moving" even though they're not moved and it's emperor's new clothes stuff...

So if it's not "emotionally moving" what is the emotional change/touch that is experienced - something in their sentimentality, such as self-pity or vapid whimsy? (This should be on the Romantic Manifesto thread).

I ask this as a person who generally represses/casts aside sentimentality but is aware that I definitely have a sentimental streak... especially when it comes to childhood memories of places, dreams, people I once knew etc.

For the record, I think your "break-though" may be a damn brilliant one!

I've been thinking about my dismissal of Sibelius fans as "dyslexic empiricists."

And I've concluded that we Objectivists have to accept that some folk are just wired up weirdly.

They're not comprachicoed and they're not evil. They're just deficient, in the way a colour-blind person is.

On some other thread here someone confesses that he can't grasp even the simplest Rand. Now, given that this person, from his posts, is clearly not unintelligent and not anti-conceptual, and that Rand's prose is crystalline, the only conclusion possible is that his brain is just incapable of operating on a certain type of conceptual level.

It's the same with quality music. It's something to do with sentimentality and the tonic note of the diatonic scale. When it comes to music, some folk are not only UNsentimental, they are vehemently ANTI-sentimental—and have no sense of "home" when it comes to the tonic note. THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE. If they're not tone-deaf they have a wayward sense of pitch, and any old meandering drivel seems "melodious" to them, and they'll report it as emotionally "moving" even though they're not moved and it's emperor's new clothes stuff, like much of Sibelius, and to a significant extent, Wagner. But that's just them being pretentious. In reality, their brains can't tell the difference between a dog's breakfast and a Rach concerto!

I believe I've made a breathrough estheto-epistemological discovery here.

Linz

PS—And anyone who can't get the Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah, the most frenziedly orgiastic music you'll ever hear (Rand would hate it) should be shot at dawn.

When I left Auckland in 2001 a listener gifted me a Readers Digest CD set of Romberg and Lehar operettas. Knowing that such sets usually feature lightweight performers, I never listened to it. Sorting through my CDs an hour so ago, I spotted that the featured soprano in Merry Widow and Desert Song, two my faves, is ... Anna Moffo. OMG!

Needless to say, I've spent the last hour or so in Heaven!

Dizziest Dizzy Bitch ever!!

Sibelius is for dyslexic empiricists

How dair yuo that saye!!

Certain people like easy-to-grasp stuff that doesn't overload their sensors, so they gravitate to Tchai and Rach and dismiss superior artists like Sibelius as too cluttered and un-integrateable.

All this stuff is readily explanable by invoking epistemological catch-phrases, duh.

Hahahaha! Where have you been hiding all this time?! Please post lots more!

Putting the point more philosophically, Sibelius is for dyslexic empiricists.

computer notation software.  Long may it remain that way.

I have the concerti by Zoltan Kocsis and Harmonies by Dimitris Sgouros—that's it, so I can't say these are my faves. Oh, and Jose Iturbi playing the finale of the first concerto in That Midnight Kiss! Very stirringly I might say.

Glad you enjoyed the Verdi. Would Pericoloso Perigo ever lead you astray?

Pericoloso Perigo, what's your favourite performance of the Liszt concerti, especially Harmonies du Soir? I'll see if I can track it down on iTunes.

I found your recommendation of La Forza del Destino, sung by Peerce and Warren on iTunes. I wasn't disappointed.

Grace has promised to teach me how to listen to classical music "properly". (What is a Sibelius anyway? )

A threesome it is. But since you know Sibelius is rubbish, Grace, I'll have to favour you over that Philistine Lance. We could despatch him to Sibelius-worshippers Cathcart or Riggenbach, or both. The threesome can be theirs, to the accompaniment of blaring trombones and blaring lotsa-other-things, all directionless.

Lance and I are much more enjoyable as a team, him with all the political talk, and I a slightly more beguiling recitative.

I adore you already!! Leave that Lance and come to me.

I agree wholeheartedly, although it is an occasion where the trombones get to play ridiculously loud without being given the damp hand from the conductor.

Thanks to Julian's post I've been listening to and watching all the Callas footage on YouTube: most enjoyable. Might see if I can find a 'best of' CD.

Brandenberg Concerto.

Those two female opera singers doing that number on Yanni's album ... (can't be more specific than that.)

Vivaldi's Four Seasons (was that Vivaldi?)

Handel and all that harpsichord stuff. Love the harpsichord.

(Not a huge, conscious, music listener. I have BBC three playing in the background most of the day while I'm working, and love a lot of the music played, but never know what it actually is being played. So long as it's quiet and aids thought, not a killer thereof. Philistine, I know.)

... folk specify some favoured performances of the Rachs. Mine—Howard Shelley for his aristocratic sparkle, Horowitz for his thunder, Earl Wild for his shimmer, Janis for his grandeur, Weissenberg for all the above ... and on and on. I'm happy to say I don't have a bad recording of these. Not forgetting Rach himself, if you can put up with all the clicks, bumps and hissing which a lazy BMG haven't bothered to tidy up.

For a real kaboom! of a Rhapsody in Blue, go for Howard Shelley.

The Liszt concerti are blood-sizzlers too. (And I adore his Harmonies du Soir. Pissed Sorry Ass, that's one for your sauna, turned WAY up! )

So, for that matter, are the Chopins, though he's not especially recognised for them. Try Krystian Zimerman.

I've just been listening to Anna Moffo's complete Butterfly. She is fantastic, definitive even, but paired with just about the worst weasel-piss KASSless tenor you ever heard aside from Paul Potts—Cesare Valletti.

Sent me scrambling to Callas/di Stefano Lucia. Aaaaaaaa!

Another fantastic pairing—Carreras and Baltsa in Samson and Delilah. Their Softly Awakes duet is glorious, capped off with a shattering High A from Jose in his final "Je t'aime." Ask O' Cresswell. He got an earful when staying with me recently. I did tell him to stand back from the speakers, but he didn't retreat in time

Linz

Oh, and of course, as discussed previously, Sibelius is complete rubbish. Pomo-bombast for tone-deaf empiricists.

Amen to the Rachmaninoff concertos!

Chris, I second your choice of Sibelius. His symphonies are very powerful.

Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 and Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26
Both on this album on Itunes, performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter, Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert Von Karajan. I had already heard, and loved, the Bruch, when Linz recommended this recording. Wow.

Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor
I love it. I get in the sauna, put it on loud, and let the music carry me away.

Ravel - Pavane for a Dead Princess
Sad and sooo beautiful. Have loved this for years. The only Ravel piece I have heard which I really like.

Bizet - L'Arlésienne Suite No.1 - Allegro deciso (prelude)
I had this tune in my head for about 15 years before I found out what and by whom it was. For some reason I always thought it was by a Russian composer - it just had that feel.

Bizet - Carmen
I can't help but sing (well, whistle ) along to this beautiful music. I got Jasmine hooked on this as well.

Puccini - O mio babbino caro, an aria from Gianni Schicchi
This is our current favourite, after hearing it in A Room with a View. The best rendition I've heard is by Maria Callas:

YouTube - Maria Callas - "O Mio Babbino Caro"

I am in love with that voice. It sounds like she's actually crying at times. Hmm... goose-bumps!

was my true gateway drug to the world of great classical music, after I was getting too used to hearing the Amadeus soundtrack over and over.

(The slow movement to the 3rd piano concerto isn't bad, either.)

You're right, Claudia, about those famous sections of Mozart's Requiem . . . for those with a Romantic sensibility, they stands up well. Same for the finale to Don Giovanni. And of course he produced some good amount of work that, however much formal beauty is in it, doesn't quite meet with Romantic listeners' foremost affection. No denying the beauty of his K.261 adagio for violin, for example. Or the slow movement to his 23rd piano concerto. I don't much listen to them or actively put them in my personal music rotation, but if they come on I'm sure to stay with them. He did a few adagios here and there that are masterful in their structure and grace - those for his "Jupiter" symphony, his 20th piano concerto, and the clarinet concerto for example. And for light fun that isn't boring fluff, the last movement of his 22nd piano concerto captures the essence of what's good in his music when he's on his game. But besides the few famous gems he created, most of what he wrote is, well, for someone with Romantic sensibilities, quite boring.

Sibelius - Symphony No. 2 (his other works are growing on me slowly but surely)
Howard Hanson - Symphony No. 2 ("Romantic")
Nielsen - Symphonies No. 4 & 5
Brahms - Symphonies No. 1 & 3
Beethoven - Emperor concerto and Symphony No. 6, other famous adagios (from Piano concerto No. 3, Pathetique sonata, violin concerto, op. 130 string quartet)

Delius - a ton of stuff, just start with any 10 works of his (and which should include "Idylle Printemps")

Vaughan Williams - 2nd movement of his 2nd symphony (my favorite classical movement), Symphonies No. 3 & 5, The Lark Ascending

Rautavaara - Anadyomene: Adoration of Aphrodite, Garden of Spaces, Cantus Arcticus, adagios to his flute and clarinet concertos

Mahler - last movement of Symphony No. 3 (nicely epitomizes what sets classical music apart from the rest), adagio movements from Nos. 4, 5, 6, and 9

Requiems by Faure and Durufle

Puccini - "Nessun dorma"

Honegger - Pastorale d'ete

Film music:

Morricone - "1900's Theme" and "Legend of the Pianist" and other stuff from the Legend of 1900 soundtrack; theme to "Once Upon a Time in America"; and a bunch of other stuff

Barry - Out of Africa; Somewhere in Time

Addinsell - Warsaw Concerto

More here and here.

The composers born in the time between 1860 and 1875 produceed a large amount of great Romantic music. Delius, Mahler, Debussy, Rach, Sibelius, Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, and maybe even Richard Strauss is starting to grow on me. Riggenbach had this nailed right on the head, but it took me a little time to come around. And somehow it's been composers born in the 1923-1928 area that have produced a lot of the most significant and interesting music for a wider audience in the later part of the 20th century.

Rachman's concertos # 2 and 3.

Lizst's piano concerto # 1 in E flat and # 2 in A.

Chopin's Nocturnes and of course his Fantasy Impromptu.

Beethoven's Emperor Concerto (this movement has a melody as tender as satin, makes me cry with gratitude that such beauty exists).
B's 5th. Valentina Lisitsa (edited)

Handel's Messiah (can't bear his Watermusic )

Mozart's Requiem... Confutatis Maledictus, Lacrimosa and Rex Tremendae especially.

but at any given time I usually have one favorite on repeat (till I OD on it), and right now it is Mendelssohn's 2nd Violin Concerto in E Minor - I love the opening solo violin theme.