Anybody a classical music fan here

[Ramses]

favorite pieces/composers/instruments/ensembles

Goldberg variations video is one of my favorites. You may recognize this from the movie Silence of the Lambs for those movie buffs

[olddots]

1. to me even bad Bach is good Bach

I listen Copland maybe too much and have really become a late bloomer in my love for classical music .Like all music alot of it isn't "classical" but it sure beats watching TV .

[Ramses]

2. I hear you

like all music even the best classical artists have crap pieces every once in a while. I still like older music. Stuff these days I cant even listen to. Maybe Im just a get off the lawn type person.

[gashaleon]

3. re

nice one

[PADemD]

4. Thank you for posting.

[sarge43]

5. Some of mine

[Ramses]

6. The 3rd video i enjoy

all good links

[sarge43]

7. Thanks n/t

[Number9Dream]

8. I've become more of a fan over time

I wish I was more knowledgeable, but here are some of my favorite pieces, with and without links:

- Beethoven - Symphony 9 - Second movement:

- Ralph Vaughan Williams - In the Fen Country; 8th Sym; 9th Sym; Tallis Fantasia; Norfolk Rhapsody

- Debussy - La Cathedrale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral); Claire de Lune

- Rachmaninoff - 2nd Piano Concerto
- Sibelius - 2nd Symphony
- DeFalla - Nights in the Gardens of Spain
- Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue
- Holst - The Planets

[pipi_k]

9. Some of mine

Also, someone mentioned Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2

My favorite movement is the second...

[First Speaker]

10. Offhand--Sibelius' 2nd Symphony, Brahms' Fourth...

...Vaughan Williams' 6th, though I like all his symphonies...Debussy and Ravel's chamber music...the Americans--Diamond, Hansen, Hovaness, Schuman--and God, an endless list of others, including the obvious--Bach, Mozart, etc...better stop while I can...

[NV Whino]

11. KDFC just did a favorite 100 countdown

Beethoven's 9th came in first, can't argue with that.

I lean toward the Romantics and the "Impressionists": Beethoven, Bruckner, Rachmaninoff, Debussy. And then there's opera. Just about anything there except English opera, AKA Billy Bud.

If anyone is looking for a good classical station, check out KDFC. They turned public a few years ago and now stream world wide. Great announcers. Great programs.

[elleng]

13. 'My' classical. station does a classical countdown every Thanksgiving,

and the top 2 contenders usually are the Beethoven #9 and Dvorak New World. THIS year:

3. Antonin Dvorák: Symphony #9 "From the New World"

2. Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony #7

1. Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony #9 in D Minor, Op. 125 "Choral"

http://www.weta.org/fm/features/classical-countdown

SO:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

12. Love love love classical music!

All the big names and orchestras.

Do not like the modern atonal stuff. I want to be able to hum the music or hear it in my mind's ear.

I stream WKSU from Ohio. Their classical channel is tops!

Here's the link to their classical channel: http://www.wksu.org/classical/classicalchannel/

[Aristus]

14. Breakdown:

Bach: the cello suites.
Mozart: Mass in C minor.
Wagner: Der Ring Des Nibelungen, in it's entirety.
Beethoven: Twelve Contradances ( which prefigure Symphony #3)
Schubert: Symphony #8 - Unfinished.

[elleng]

15. Thanks for this thread.

Was away from music much of today. Here's one on my top 5 list:

[Manifestor_of_Light]

16. Too many to list.

Classical player here as well, on two instruments. Started piano lessons and learned to read music at age five.
Started violin lessons at age ten. My piano teacher was also a violinist which is quite unusual. Took both lessons from him from age 7 until high school graduation, ten years later.

Was in orchestra in junior high, high school, college and later community orchestras.
Also like opera when they put the words up over the stage in English, some jazz and old rock 'n roll. Basically anything from the sixties through the mid to late eighties. What I call geezer rock, because the original guys still touring are in their sixties and seventies.

Most pop music today sounds really vacuous to me. Saw a band called Echosmith open for Sting last weekend, and they were good. They actually played good acoustic guitar and didn't overdo the distortion. They even knew about triplet eighths against quarters!!

I love to tell people about music and say "Listen to this, this is good stuff!!" of whatever kind.

I played so much Bach when I was young. On the violin, you have to play lots of baroque and classical stuff (Bach, Handel, Mozart) to get your technique nice and clean and they won't let you play any of that sloppy Romantic stuff. Because I played too much Bach when I was young, it felt like my brain was dipped in alcohol. Just too sterile. And the amount of expression you can have is strictly limited in classical music. At least in the baroque and classical periods. Some Beethoven has too much verticality and not enough horizontal movement. Too much chord structure and not enough melodic movement. I do enjoy Beethoven's Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

I'd rate some other people higher than Beethoven. Like Schubert and Dvorak. The late Beethoven string quartets are supposed to be the height of something or other, and I listen to them. I've seen manuscripts of some of them and they look unplayable.

[kwassa]

17. Me.

I love music in all it's forms.

I feel fairly ignorant about the vast subject of classical music except to say this:

I keep coming back to Bach, my first love.

[sir pball]

18. I grew up on it, with my hippie piano-playing dad

Plenty of other stuff as well, from Delta blues to the Chick Cores Elektric Band, but always grounded in the masters..

This has been called the greatest piece of music ever written, in any style, anywhere, anytime. I may agree.

This performance happened a twenty minute train ride away, on a night I was off. I don't know if I'll ever get over missing it..

Contrapuntality is such a lost art..

Funny story - the orchestra premeired this while the ink was still wet on the pages.

Some guys wrote pieces out of sheer spite, just to show off.

And some others kept it simple, technically...just inhuman!

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

19. I love Rameau

one of the great Baroque composers. Bach's my fave but I also love Rameau, especially played by an ancient orchestra with the crisp-sounding baroque violins with no chin rest and the other ancient instruments.

[DeSwiss]

20. A HUGE FAN!

- I LOVE ALL MUSIC really. But I cut my teeth listening to my mother playing Horowitz and Cliburn, and Bernstein.

About a year or so ago, I began listening to the youth orchestras and the youth festivals clips on Youtube. These young'uns seem to bring new life to the old standards. The older professional classical musicians will more often sit calmly and play the most exacting and complex pieces -- or emotionally uplifting -- and you'd never know they were even listening to themselves from their expressions, because they've done it so may times before.

But these young people are still freshly in-love with the music and it shows. They can't sit still while they play it. The Gustav Mahler Jugend Orchester is an absolute favorite:

(The First Chair here is outstanding!)

As well as the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra:

Here is Anna Federova a student of the Royal College of Music in London and studies with Leonid Margarius at the Accademia Pianistica Incontri col Maestro:

And this young woman finalist from the 2013 YPF -- Rosalía Gómez Lasheras:

Those kids can rock!!!

And then I could never not mention three of my favorite pianists, first, the world-renown child-prodigy -- now all grown up -- the incomparable Yuja Wang:

And a ''newcomer'' who found her fame and fortune simply by posting her stuff freely on Youtube and attracted record company contract offers as a result -- my favorite Ukrainian: Valentina Lisitsa:

And the old man of the bunch, Murray Perahia:

(It's call Head & Shoulders, Murray!)

And in the category of conductors one of my top three favs, I give you Valery Gergiev:

I have to listen to music daily. Have to.