My Top Fifty Classical Music Pieces.

Tee hee!  Your responses are almost Pavlovian, Mr Brodsky!   Keep it up.

And talking of contamination, can you tell us what inspired your latest forum name?  We know what you intend with it, but does it address everyone, or just me?  

Vic.

Vic.

Excellent suggestion, Petra, but to play the arbitrator between such kind of gents is a rather heavy task.

On a more serious note, to help Ian, for all it might be worth, I would suggest :

- Stick to the music of J.S. Bach for as long as your patience can allow you. He (and his son C.P.E. Bach) are the great school of learning and initiating you to the rest of Classical Music forward and backward.

- Listen to the prolific composers like Haydn and Mozart, even Schubert. They constitute basic knowledge and fundemental listening, moving to the most critical period of the Great Classics. Beethoven should follow a bit afterwards. He is a more unique case as far as his compositions are concerned.

- Then, you may move to the great Romantics (and they are plenty). And so on.

Listening at random, moving from one composer to another (or even worse from one work to another) doesn't lead but to accidental successes and inevitable failures. Bach can never betray you, even if some of his works may bore you.

Good luck.

Parla

Hi Ian. Glad to see that you are back online! And, yes, good idea to check out G's iplayer! The podcasts in which they interview people about composers, etc. can be very interesting plus the historical albums. The newer albums excerpts help to give one an idea what a piece of music is like, but also, they are only one movement, so do keep that in mind. What about listening to stations like the BBCR3 (I listen to it sometimes online. My guess is that you can listen to it over a real radio?! LOL)? Their "Composer of the Week" series can be quite interesting and enlightening. Plus one can do the "Listen Again" for a whole week over the computer too in case you can't listen to it live the first time around. Anyway, do let us know how you get on with your listening and explorations!

Best wishes,

Petra

Hugh

You are a spoilsport.

You may dislike lists, but, equally others do.

Don't join in.

They can't help themselves.

It is almost automatic, as a list pops up on a thread they feel the need to tell all participants what they think about lists.

Usually, we have heard it all before but on they prattle.

They are like dust-mites, they will never be got rid of.

As a composer I have learned that having a 'top 50' of pieces or composers just is pointless. I had a friend who had a set top 100 greatest composers (Mozart being his first and Wagner being his worst!) and that is just ridiculously laughable.I think it also limits a person expanding their horizons. I discover new wonderful pieces all the time listening to Youtube and that is part of the enjoyment of music.I think that many composers, even the very obscure, have written great music. I recently heard the first piece of Matthew Locke's Consort of four parts and it is amazing ,yet not well known. I have recently heard some Ropartz-symphony no. 1 and 4-again hardly played but great stuff.And some Maconchy and Simpson quartets eg. the seventh quartet of those composers are worth exploring. We need to free ourselves from the whole classic fm safe way of thinking. Yes Brahms and Beethoven and Mozart are great but I think other composers not as known also wrote great music eg. Zemlinsky. I think it is pointless to have 'favourites' as I discover new stuff all the time.