Hands up! Whose music do you really hate? A continuation...

By all possible means, Troyen, although I struggle sometimes with your relentless and ruthless sense of humour, which, sometimes to some posters, may supersede the essence of your posts.

However, your contributions are always welcome to any debate for their pertinence and strong involvement.

Parla

To your dismay, "V", I am prolific too! I am also armed with enough sense of humour not to be offended but only on matters of substance or principle.

The most important thing: I don't hate music; on the contrary, I love and appreciate, to the highest degree, this form of Art. (Some people may have traced that...).

Parla

Ballet music by Chabrier. 

Come to think of it, any ballet music.

...Or "Romeo and and Juliet" of Prokofiev along with some other magnificent scores for ballet (e.g. Cinderella) and the exciting ones of Shostakovich (The Bolt, The Age of Gold, etc,).

Parla

YAAAAAAAAWN!

In fact, Parla, I'd rather listen to Arvo Part's 7 Magnificat Antiphons which I am doing right now.

Chabrier didn't write any ballet scores, as far as I know, though no doubt some of his music has been hijacked for ballets. He did though write a wonderful operetta called L'Etoile, which earns him a high place in my affections. Even his sub-Wagnerian opera Gwendoline isn't at all bad, while his 10 Pièces Pittoresques are not surpassed by any other piano work I know from the last couple of decades of the 19th century.

Two observations, one already made by several posters - like so many words of this type, 'hate' has become diluted/devalued by writers/speakers attempting to make a case or establish a point.  Use with inverted commas might have indicated the lightness of touch/intended humour suggested by some posters, but hate should never be used as a synonym for 'dislike': it merely shows a poor appreciation of the shades of meaning that English, with its rich vocabulary, offers to writers.

It is true that there was a tendency of some composers to mark time or dispense some rather second rate ideas in parts of their ballet scores - even Swan Lake has its longeurs.  And quite a few composers, perhaps conscious of this, prepared concert suites which offered the best music.  I suspect that for every individual hearing the complete Swan Lake today, there will be upward of ten playing the suite.  However, a dismissal of ballet music as a genre would in any caser to leave a lot of modern ballet - Checkmate, Adam Zero, Horoscope before the war, Malcolm Arnold, Stravinsky's Agon, and most recently the ballets of Patrick Feeney - ouside the pale.