Search For Prokofiev Complete Piano Music Vol 2 at Amazon
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Now and then, humans ask me for counsel on where to get started with the daunting world of classical music recordings. They’ve heard bits here and there, they’re curious, they imagine they’d in all probability take delight in it once they got involved, but they wouldn’t know where to look if they walked into — oops, I mean logged onto eMusic.com and started poking around. My system is always to offer a handful of suggestions, in as wide a assortment as possible. “Try these,” I say. “See what grabs you, and we’ll work from there.” That’s the idea behind this Dozen. Here are 12 recordings chosen to entice persons who have had little exposure to classical music, but who recognise they want more. I’ve cautiously contrived the list to cover a wide range of colors and styles, instruments and moods, shapes and sizes. Some pieces are light, some heavy; some charming, a lot of imposing; a heap of dramatic, meditative, amorous, tragic, lofty, goofy. All in all, the selections partly include a broader 1,200 years of music history — and they’ve all been chosen to make a good basi impression and whet your appetite. They’re “gateway” works, if you will. I’d be amazed if there were any person who couldn’t find something on this list that pleasured and intrigued them. Think of it as a sampler, a tapas menu: if you don’t care for the stuffed olives/Renaissance Mass, undertake the garlic shrimp/20th-century string quartet. Are these the twelve biggest works ever? No, though a lot of of them could justifiedly assert a place on such a list. Most of these are works I actually have suggested to people, and which have gotten a favorable response. Others I have seen appeal to newbies in ways I never expected. Others are just a few personal favorites which I proselytize for whenever possible. Gregorian Chant For Easter Artist: Capella Antiqua, Munich Release Date: 2006 The recorded history of “classical” music in the Western “art” tradition (so a lot of of these terms are so problematic) begins in the medieval amount of time with music composed for church use — settings of sacred texts in Latin for choirs singing in unison, just one note at a time. The serene meditativeness of Gregorian chant (named for liturgical reformer Pope Gregory, 540-604, who launched the exercise according to legend) has made it general in recent years, usable as a backdrop for anything from yoga to post-rave chilling. There are a great deal of chant CDs out there, a heap of with hipper packaging, but these performances by the male voices of Capella Antiqua, Munich, surrounded by a cathedral-like halo of reverb, are stately and gorgeous. Ockeghem: Requiem Artist: Ensemble Organum, Marcel Peres Release Date: 1993 A friend of mine, likewise a musician, has played a number of classical pieces for his infant son, and reports that Allen seems to like the music of Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410-1497) best. It could be the way this Renaissance composer weaves voices together to fabricate a sort of ear-blanket. Or perchance this music’s low tame murmuring reminds him of sounds in utero. Either way, the Ensemble Organum’s performance of this Requiem (a Mass to honor the dead) is spacious and calm, but likewise possesses a sort of authoritative, virile resonance. Bach: Six Concertos for the Margrave of Brandenburg Artist: Trevor Pinnock Release Date: 2008 Incomparably joyous and sparkling, these six pieces may assert to be both the greatest of baroque instrumental works and, with the possible exception of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” concertos, the most popular. Composers in the baroque era (roughly 1600-1750) prioritized a musical skill called counterpoint, the exercise of combining independent instrumental or vocal lines into a complex whole. Johann Sebastian Bach had no rivals (and surely never will) in this art, giving each division of the orchestra something rewarding — and fun — to do. He built structures of grandeur and irresistible energy. Each of these concertos are scored for a dissimilar combination; if you’d like a taste, undertake the firstborn motion of the Concerto no. 2, in which four bright-toned soloists (violin, flute, oboe and trumpet) dance festively around the accompanying string orchestra, or the fleet finale of the Concerto no. 3, a whirlwind showpiece for strings alone. MOZART: Overtures Artist: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart After Bach and his contemporaries had brought Baroque counterpoint to it is peak, composers of the next generation reacted by lightening the texture of their music. The melody line dominated, and the middle and bass instruments were entrusted with harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment rather than with independent lines of their own. This new style, though, was no less bubbling and energetic — see the overtures (instrumental preludes) which Mozart (1756-91) wrote for his operas. Brilliant attention-getters, arresting but never too pompous, full of attentiongetting tunes, cheeky wind solos and stirring trumpet-and drum passages, these overtures are played with great verve by Capella Istropolitana. CHOPIN: Etudes Opp. 10 and 25 Artist: Freddy Kempf Release Date: 2004 Frederic Chopin’s music, full of inventions in subtle differences in meaning or opinion or attitude of concordance and delicate coloristic effects, pushed the boundaries of what a piano could do. In these two sets of etudes (completed in 1832 and 1836), he also pushed piano technique, making unexampled demands of virtuosity in works that are still amid the most richly dazzling ever written. Not all the pieces are finger-tanglers, though; a lot of are studies in sensible touch and singing melody. Though pianist Freddy Kempf’s technique is precise, these etudes are for him poetry first; in op. 10 no. 3 in E or op. 25 no. 1 in A-flat, he phrases the surface melody with the expressivity a great vocalist might fetch to it. Pearl Fishers and Other Famous Operatic Duets Artist: Various Artists It occurred to me that an album of duets might make an even better introduction to opera than one of solo arias — even altho those big diva/divo moments are what the popular public thinks of when they listen the term opera. Duets, of course, display the reputation interplay that the dramatic side of opera is all about: love, conflict, friendship — or betrayal, as in the searing finale to Act II of Verdi’s Otello, when Iago falsely swears dedication to the title character. Two rapturous and justifiedly frequent duets recorded here come from French operas, the rest from Italian. Complete recordings of a heap of of these operas are likewise available on eMusic, so if these excerpts whet your appetite, you may move on to explore the entire work. Dvorak / Haydn / Shostakovich: String Quartets Artist: Quartetto Cassoviae Release Date: 2000 Contained on this disc is a mini-history of the string quartet itself: an elegant, buoyant piece (1799) by Franz Josef Haydn, a pioneer of the form; a fragrantly tuneful example (1893) by Antonin Dvorak, written under the influence of American folksong; and a bitter, semi-autobiographical work (1960) by Dmitri Shostakovich, reflective of his state of mind for the duration of a life lived under Soviet oppression. The Quartetto Cassoviae’s performance of this last quartet is perchance the disc’s most impressive: it’s taut, wiry, grippingly expressive and even a little nightmarish. Alexander Borodin: Symphony No.2 – Conducted by Carlos Kleiber & Erich Kleiber Artist: Kleiber Release Date: 2003 I chose this symphony because I without doubt or question do not forget my sister, eight or nine at the time, dragged to one of my school orchestra concerts and, at it is conclusion, telling me she liked this piece best. The brusque gesture that launches Alexander Borodin’s Second Symphony (1876) is unquestionably one of the more arresting openings: glowering, ardent and Russian, Russian, Russian. Compare it to the sinuous oboe melody that comes later, and you listen the two sides of Borodin’s musical personality: barbaric vs. sensuous, both tinged with the exotic folk colors of ancient Asian tribes. This disc is also the only one I know that offers father-son performances of the same work, by Erich (1890-1956) and Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004). STRAVINSKY: 125th Anniversary Album – The Rite of Spring / Violin Concerto (Stravinsky, Vol. Artist: Jennifer Frautschi When Igor Stravinsky got a commission to write music for a ballet depicting ancient fertility rituals, did he intend from the commence to revolutionize musical history? He filled his colorful score (completed in 1913) with pounding, asymmetrical rhythms and harsh dissonances — unexampled constituents at the time; he’s one of the some composers in the introductory few decades of the 20th century who tossed a bomb into the middle of Romantic-era assumptions in regards to what music could be. This earthy, viscerally intense showpiece still startles audiences — particularly those who see classical music as something stuffy and genteel. Think of it as heavy metal classical. Robert Craft, a longtime colleague of the composer, conducts a exceptionally gutsy and un-pretty performance. Strauss: Symphonia Domestica / Eine Alpensinfonie / Oboe Concerto / Duett-Concertino Artist: Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Release Date: 2006 This disc shows the two sides of composer Richard Strauss. In the Symphonia domestica (1903) and Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony, 1915), he capped the tradition of German romanticism with two of the grandest and most opulent orchestral works ever; in his two nostalgic concertos (one for oboe from 1945, the other for clarinet and bassoon from 1947), he revived the spirit of Mozart in slender, tuneful, but autumnal pieces for a (much) littler orchestra. Oboe soloist Jonathan Small, in particular, plays with ravishing fluency, and conductor Gerard Schwarz is in particular adept in this soaring, sweeping music. Daughters Of The Lonsome Isle Artist: Margaret Leng Tan Release Date: 1994 Just by inserting screws, rubber erasers and other tidbits amid a piano’s strings, John Cage (1912-1992) was capable to turn the instrument into a miniature percussion orchestra. This was just one of the avant gardist’s a lot of innovations. On this disc, keyboardist Margaret Leng Tan, the world’s foremost toy piano virtuoso, pay homage to Cage’s experiments, his rhythmic vitality and the Zen-inspired spirit that led him to ask unfathomed conceptual questions when it comes to music. But even as Cage challenged conventional notions of music, it’s not hard to find great beauty, wit, depth and spiritual gentleness in his work. It’s scarcely possible, for example, not to fall in love with Cage’s pulsing, gnomic Bacchanale or the elegiac In the Name of the Holocaust, which proves that the instrument he called a “prepared piano” was just as capable of stark intensity. Reich: Different Trains Artist: The Duke Quartet, Andrew Russo & Marc Mellits As a child in the early ’40s, composer Steve Reich applied to travel throughout the U.S. by train each year. In thinking regarding the very “different trains” he could have been riding as a Jew had he grown up in Europe, Reich was inspired to compose this powerful work for string quartet and tape. Snippets of recorded consultations with actual railroad workers are woven among the urgently churning string parts, with their licks echoing the speakers’ vocal inflections. Also included here is Reich’s 1967 Piano Phase, which was a groundbreaking early work that employed a compositional technique that caught his imagination: complex rhythmic effects achieved by subtle shifts in temporal coordination amid musicians, creating a trance-like rippling effect. Most helpful customer reviews 13 of 13 people found the following review helpful. 10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. One other note here. Schoenberg and his ilk did a lot to discredit the modern Russians, claiming that they were just hacking out forms that had been long ago interred by more advanced practitioners (like himself of course). A lot of that has worn off, but revisionism has still not landed Prokofiev his just due. Nevermind his lyricism, which is a match for anyone else, but many of his ideas and forms are very interestingly modern in other ways. For instance, he was a master of idiom and turning pieces inside out based on their structural underpinnings. His first symphony was composed as an exercise based on the thought ‘If Haydn were still alive, what would he compose?’ and Prokofiev’s answer was much the same thing, with a few amendments to his musical language. (A wonderful counter to Shoenberg’s cretinous progressive/positivist views of musical history.) Also, many of his compositions use popular idioms and take them apart, turning them into farces, in a very interesting way. Ravel’s La Valse got a lot of attention for lampooning the Waltz, but Prokofiev wrote some of the most beautiful waltzes ever, and yet they are tinged with irony, nay parody. This practice is on display in these pieces, and the result is similar to what became the dominant mode of exploration during the Cool Jazz period: taking popular pieces and pulling them apart and reconstructing them in other forms. 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. |
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