Nikan
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Post by Nikan on Feb 15, 2023 19:16:53 GMT
Looked for and didn't find any thread specifically for this kind of music. So, let's get classy shall we?
Post classical gems you come across here (or any personal fave, special performances etc.)
Hypnotic...
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 15, 2023 20:05:44 GMT
Probably my favorite solo piano work, by my favorite composer. It's also one of my wife's favs (she's a pianist), so we had it played at our wedding for the entrance processional (because fuck Pachelbel's Canon).
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 15, 2023 20:14:48 GMT
People are just obsessed with pacinoyes and music ........Does he really think Pet Sounds is "Overrated " (Yes, yes he does........ thanx4asking) .......is he really Punker Than Thou? ( He is.......Do what thou whilt) .........does he like Classical Music more than okra? Well, that's hard to say.......... but Paganini sold his soul to the Devil - how Metal is that? ......and he beat Jimmy Page to this shit way before Page found that screeching wackjob to sing about his lemon being squeezed ......
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 15, 2023 20:57:53 GMT
Speaking of metal...
And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this headbangable classic (more Stravinsky):
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Post by PromNightCarrie on Feb 16, 2023 0:54:27 GMT
God this (Daybreak (Daphne et Chloe by Maurice Ravel) is up there with my favorite pieces of classical music ever. Tell me this doesn't transport you..
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Post by PromNightCarrie on Feb 16, 2023 0:57:57 GMT
Probably my favorite solo piano work, by my favorite composer. It's also one of my wife's favs (she's a pianist), so we had it played at our wedding for the entrance processional (because fuck Pachelbel's Canon). People don't talk about that eccentric pianist Glenn Gould enough. He was far more interesting than the musicians being shoved down our throats in these biopics.
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Nikan
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Post by Nikan on Feb 16, 2023 6:24:35 GMT
Well, that's hard to say.......... but Paganini sold his soul to the Devil - how Metal is that? ......and he beat Jimmy Page to this shit way before Page found that screeching wackjob to sing about his lemon being squeezed ...... If I had a dollar for every time you bash Zeppelin..... I could've attended every Paganini concert in the world PromNightCarrie Film composers owe a lot to Ravel I feel
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Nikan
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Post by Nikan on Feb 16, 2023 8:10:07 GMT
"Andras", the opening piece here sounds like "Moonlight" doesn't it?... "Written On the Sky" 1 & 2:
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Post by PromNightCarrie on Feb 16, 2023 12:25:12 GMT
Well, that's hard to say.......... but Paganini sold his soul to the Devil - how Metal is that? ......and he beat Jimmy Page to this shit way before Page found that screeching wackjob to sing about his lemon being squeezed ...... If I had a dollar for every time you bash Zeppelin..... I could've attended every Paganini concert in the world PromNightCarrie Film composers owe a lot to Ravel I feel I know. Robert Plant would have been sent to him as part of the gift exchange with Satan! And *ahem* the Lemon Song is a groove (John Paul Jones' bass ). But back to classical... You can tell. That piece I posted is a perfect example and Pavane for a Dead Princess. I do not like Bolero though. I also want to post something by Ravel's pupil, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. It is The Lark Ascending performed here by violinist Hilary Hahn - a girl whose breathtaking playing I've been following for years.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 17, 2023 5:56:23 GMT
Very much here for the Ravel love. Here’s a piece by the guy he’s often lumped together with (wrongly). I know Nikan is a Debussy fan... this is originally written for piano, but I wanted to share this lovely arrangement instead. The first time I heard it was actually when I played a string arrangement of it in high school, so I didn’t hear the piano version until later.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 18, 2023 7:02:36 GMT
Since we just had the year of Mahler in movies...
Not my favorite Mahler symphony overall (that would be No. 2), but this is one of my favorite individual movements from his symphonies (Bernstein conducting, natch). His slow movements are among the best ever written, and this one is particularly wrenching and impassioned, almost overwhelming and emotionally exhausting to listen to. Composed near the end of his life (his last completed symphony that he didn’t live to see performed), it has the feel of a farewell... the ending even sounds like the fading of life, especially with the way the four-note motif heard throughout becomes inverted in the final moments (going “belly-up”).
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 20, 2023 9:08:33 GMT
Not just the greatest of Beethoven’s late works, but one of the best things he ever wrote, period. People are sometimes bewildered by some of the stuff he composed in his late period because of how off-the-wall it can be, and morons think he was “losing it” at this point in his life because of his deafness, but no... he knew exactly what he was doing. It’s music that’s couched in tradition, but sounds incredibly modern at the same time.
Exquisitely performed by this group as well, with great communication among the players.
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Nikan
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Post by Nikan on Feb 20, 2023 15:41:41 GMT
Not just the greatest of Beethoven’s late works, but one of the best things he ever wrote, period. People are sometimes bewildered by some of the stuff he composed in his late period because of how off-the-wall it can be, and morons think he was “losing it” at this point in his life because of his deafness, but no... he knew exactly what he was doing. It’s music that’s couched in tradition, but sounds incredibly modern at the same time. Who would you say did the best Beethoven cinematic Beethoven? Gary Oldman, Ed Harris or somebody else? I have come across clips of Immortal Beloved on Youtube but I don't know... I find many of Oldman's movies not maching his talent or performances.
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Post by stabcaesar on Feb 20, 2023 16:11:17 GMT
Lydia Tár is watching you.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 20, 2023 22:19:13 GMT
Not just the greatest of Beethoven’s late works, but one of the best things he ever wrote, period. People are sometimes bewildered by some of the stuff he composed in his late period because of how off-the-wall it can be, and morons think he was “losing it” at this point in his life because of his deafness, but no... he knew exactly what he was doing. It’s music that’s couched in tradition, but sounds incredibly modern at the same time. Who would you say did the best Beethoven cinematic Beethoven? Gary Oldman, Ed Harris or somebody else? I have come across clips of Immortal Beloved on Youtube but I don't know... I find many of Oldman's movies not maching his talent or performances. I actually haven't seen Harris and have only seen Immortal Beloved, where I remember thinking Oldman was pretty great. It's been a really long time since I've watched it though...
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 22, 2023 9:30:57 GMT
One of the great violin sonatas performed by one of my favorite violinists. Franck is only really known for a handful of compositions, and this is one of his most famous works. In my former violin studio, the Franck Sonata was nicknamed the “Frank Sinatra.” People often talk about how difficult the piano part is for this, so it’s not merely “accompanying” the violin or subordinate to it in this piece, but rather its equal in some ways.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 23, 2023 9:24:45 GMT
Not sure how many here are familiar with the composer Steve Reich, but one of the things his music is famous for is the use of a "phasing" technique - where at least two parts of a musical texture will play a repetitive pattern in unison at first, but then one part gradually becomes displaced and out of sync with the other, which remains constant, creating all kinds of cool new emergent patterns as the parts become more and more out of sync. Sometimes this is done by periodically inserting an extra note (or temporarily removing one) into one instrumental part, which shifts it by a single beat.
This piece is a good example of the technique, though here the phasing occurs after the main repeated rhythm is first "built up" note by note in a kind of additive process.
I'm always kind of awestruck watching these kinds of pieces performed because it requires such an insane amount of rhythmic precision to get right, and the effect can be quite hypnotic to both watch and listen to.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 26, 2023 7:46:47 GMT
This piece is such an adrenaline rush... with what has to be one of the hardest wood block parts to play. No joke... to a listener it might sound stupidly simple like Will Ferrell playing cowbell with Blue Oyster Cult in the SNL skit, but you’re the metronome that holds this rhythmically unstable piece together. The pressure is on you to be the foundation, so it must take an incredible amount of concentration to be the source of stability while chaos is happening all around you.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Mar 3, 2023 4:51:53 GMT
Discovery of the day: Erkki Salmenhaara, a Finnish symphonist apparently abandoned the musical avant-garde to write stuff like this. Does some pretty interesting things with harmony, and sounds quite cinematic:
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Mar 6, 2023 10:15:18 GMT
I think I may have posted a gif from this video in one of the Tár threads, but here is Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide with Bernstein himself conducting... and dancing. Hopefully Lenny passed along his dance skills to Lydia in her studies with him!
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Mar 7, 2023 11:43:44 GMT
This is a choral arrangement of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which on some days I might call the single greatest piece of music ever written. A pretty well-known work – played at a lot of famous people’s funerals including JFK and Albert Einstein, often performed during times of mourning, featured in several movie soundtracks, most notably Platoon (where it’s grossly overused imo). The original is my preferred version, but this arrangement has its own kind of visceral power given that it’s all produced by the human voice. It goes beyond chill-inducing... more like soul-shredding...
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Mar 8, 2023 12:29:20 GMT
One of every violinist’s “holy grail” solo pieces to learn because of how challenging it is to perform... but it’s also just a great work of art and not simply a technical exercise. That anti-Bach student in Tár clearly never listened to this piece! Brahms (my favorite composer) had this to say about it: “The Chaconne is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music . . . [Bach] writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I could picture myself writing, or even conceiving, such a piece, I am certain that the extreme excitement and emotional tension would have driven me mad.” Performing it well partly means being able to convey an immensity, a majestic vastness with a relatively small instrument. I wanted to post a live performance because it’s always better to watch performers too while listening, but the best recording I know of is this one by Hilary Hahn (who PromNightCarrie mentioned in an earlier post!):
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Mar 10, 2023 9:14:19 GMT
Speaking of “holy grails,” I was recently listening to Winbeck’s Symphony No. 5 (an incredible work), and this bit from the third movement happened to remind me of the Grail music from the score to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Mar 20, 2023 3:47:56 GMT
Not my favorite Schubert Impromptu (that would be the G-flat major one), but I like this one a lot because of its rather poignant expressive arc – a minor-to-major key trajectory onto which a narrative of tragedy-to-reconciliation is mapped... but one that’s not a pure transformation where triumph stamps out the tragic. Here, the “narrator” never fully shakes the sorrow, but is still able to make peace and find a kind of resolution. Of all the Impromptus in this particular set, this one most clearly establishes a sense of working through trials and tribulations as part of its musical narrative (the others have their dark moments, but they aren’t as integrated into the lighter parts as systematically).
This piece is used in the film Amour (along with the G-flat major Impromptu) in an interesting way because it only uses a very short excerpt from the piece’s opening - the tragic portion. By leaving out the piece’s working through of conflicts, we’re musically denied the reconciliation that’s supposed to happen, which seems dramatically apt for the film.
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Mar 22, 2023 5:07:00 GMT
One of the very best Chopin Nocturnes, presenting a haunting and mysterious main theme at the beginning, and slowly building to a spectacular ending that features one of the most chillingly sublime decorations of a melody Chopin ever wrote (at 3:45). The lead-up to the end is basically one long, shaped crescendo that ebbs and flows, a swell of passion that then sort of dissolves into scintillating beauty as the piano rises in register.
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