Are there any classical music experts here?

>Nemesio, that's a wonderfu explanation of what was going on with Brahms. It brings me back to my student days in university music school. As a point of useless trivia, my high school music teacher studied piano intensively with one of Brahms' students.
>Although I am not a pianist, I have played both Brahms Piano Concertos many times in the orchestra (playing those lovely horn solos), and I agree that No. 2 is the better one. A horn player is in seventh heaven playing almost anything by Brahms because he knew how to write for the horn.
>Since this thread started with Glenn Gould, it might be interesting to know that I used to live just around the corner from where Gould lived in Toronto on St. Clair Ave. just west of Yonge St., although I did not know this at the time. Gould, a notoriouis recluse, used to frequent a nearby small diner in the wee small hours of the morning, and I ran into him there there once in about 1973. Out of respect, I never approached him, and it was only after he died that I learned he lived practically across the street.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Nemesio, are you a musicologist or some such? You seem to have a deep appreciation of music.

I'm 'ABD' at the University of Pittsburgh in Hysterical Musicology. My dissertation, a scintillating
work, is about the evolution of the Mass for the Dead from the inception of written notation until
the Council of Trent.

Riveting stuff, that.

Nemesio

Originally posted by Nemesio
It's funny that you should describe it this way, because that's exactly how it was conceived.

In the decades after Beethoven, because of the writings of such critics as E.T.A. Hoffman and
A.B. Marx, composers of the 'Romantic' period were sort of gunshy when it came to writing
symphonies. That is, anything they ever wrote was immediately compa ...[text shortened]... nd the Violin Concerto over the first piano concerto, personally.

Nemesio

I'm actually very fond of all these pieces. Brahms and Dvorak are probably the two romantics I listen to the most. I very much like Dvorak's D minor symphony, for example. I like some of Elgar, too.

But I'm by no means one who focuses on that period alone. I also enjoy the baroque -- Handel and the Bach family, William Boyce, the Scarlattis, too many other Italians to mention --

I'll leave out two from that era: not inspired by Telemann and also not all that fond of Vivaldi.

Of the classical period, I'm completely conventional in appreciating Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - but there are many others.

Not sure where I'd put Schubert -- seems really sometimes quite romantic and then sometimes not so much. His string quintet in C is one of my all time favs.

And there are a lot of 20th century composers I keep turning to again and again -- a wide range of different styles. Stravinsky, Copland, Barber, Richard Strauss, Vaughn Williams, Khachaturian, Kodaly, Janacek, Delius.

Why, I even like Berg's violin concerto, it just took me some time to get into it, you might say. But it is really very affecting after one does.

And Bartok I find fascinating - it is as though he's got an entirely different idea about acoustics.

Sometimes a piece will bore into my head and stick there, provoking a reaction both aesthetically and emotionally, that is hard to describe. Neurologists call one aspect of this an "earworm" where you can't get the music out of your head. I enjoyed the book "This is Your Brain on Music."

Just now I'm listening to Handel's Royal Fireworks music -- I cannot find anything by Telemann that affects me so greatly. There is something about Handel that flows so naturally, whereas Telemann seems like hack work to me -- music to dine by, not listen to.

I'm not that picky, however. I'll listen to Mahler and Bruckner, but I prefer Faure, Ravel and Debussy. I'll listen to Wagner, but it isn't an either or regarding Brahms -- it's both. But I do listen to Brahms more often than I do to Wagner's music. Tunes get tiresome.

Structure, however, fascinates me. Of all the works by Brahms, I am most fond of his chamber works, on the whole. For example, recently I've been playing Brahms' Piano Trios 1 & 2 with Katchen, Suk, and Starker. I prefer the string quintets and sextets over the string quartets, don't know why. But I like his Piano Quartets very much. Brahms seems to take just a few notes that appear mere fragments and from these he weaves a complex pattern I find very powerful at times.

Originally posted by Nemesio
I'm 'ABD' at the University of Pittsburgh in Hysterical Musicology. My dissertation, a scintillating
work, is about the evolution of the Mass for the Dead from the inception of written notation until
the Council of Trent.

Riveting stuff, that.

Nemesio

I've pedestrian tastes, I'm sure - sentimental to a fault.

love Rachmaninoff, even Carl Orff. I don't care if Gould thought Orff's In Trutina was "vapid." I like it.

Listened to Mozart's Requiem in the car late last night coming home from the beach -- the western sky was darkening as we started out, but as the piece began, we saw we were driving into an approaching weather front full of clouds dark blue on the outside but which lighted up amber as the lightning inside began to flash. Seemed a good fit --

My favorite piece of that type, however, is Faure's requiem, even though my neighbor says it isn't solemn enough. She's German and a Catholic, so I can appreciate why she might feel that way.

I've an old recording of Charles Munch conducting the French National Orchestra in Pelleas and Melisande -- from infancy until I was into middle school, I attended concerts by the Boston Symphony and so the first great conductor I saw was Munch. But Bernstein grew up in the small town just about next door to my grandmother's house and since his father didn't want him playing the piano, he taught himself to play on my grandmother's old upright. He and my mother's older sister were friends -- she's 92 now and remembers nothing except those old days. So it was natural that I would grow up hearing classical music and learning to become quite dependent on hearing it. Keeps me fairly sane in this otherwise completely chaotic, seemingly random existence. In this kind of music there is order, form, and therefore the contradiction of the absurd does not arise to turn my anxiety into angst. And since I can no longer partake of the Water of Life, I've no other form of solace.

Originally posted by AttilaTheHorn
A horn player is in seventh heaven playing almost anything by Brahms because he knew how to write for the horn.

It doesn't matter how bad my day has been, if I hear that opening horn call from the 2nd Piano
Concerto, it's instant tranquility.

I'm too young to have ever seen Glenn Gould and remembered. He died when I was just a wee
lad. I became interested in him when I read an article in the NYTimes on the 10th anniversary
of his death and the upcoming SONYClassical productions of his performances. One listen to
his recording of the WTC I and I was hooked.

Nemesio

Originally posted by Nemesio
Originally posted by AttilaTheHorn
[b]A horn player is in seventh heaven playing almost anything by Brahms because he knew how to write for the horn.

It doesn't matter how bad my day has been, if I hear that opening horn call from the 2nd Piano
Concerto, it's instant tranquility.

I'm too young to have ever seen Glenn Gould and remembered ...[text shortened]... of his performances. One listen to
his recording of the WTC I and I was hooked.

Nemesio[/b]

>I think the best horn passage in all of Brahms compositions is at the end of the first movement of his Second Symphony, a moment so wonderful that words cannot describe it. you're right, that opening of the Second Piano Concerto is wonderful too, setting the tone and mood for one the longest piano concertos in the repertoire.
> But of course there are so many good horn parts in Brahms, the horn call in the 1st Symphony, the wonderful solo in the 3rd, the beginning of the second movement in the 4th, the great passages in the 1st Serenade, and on and on. I played his Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano last year again for the unpteenth time. I was on cloud nine all the way through. Brahms new what horn playing was all about, and so too did R. Strauss.

Originally posted by Scriabin
My favorite piece of that type, however, is Faure's requiem, even though my neighbor says it isn't solemn enough. She's German and a Catholic, so I can appreciate why she might feel that way.

Not solemn enough?! It's transcendental! Only the Durufle has it matched
(and perhaps beaten) for its mystic quality.

As it turns out, All Souls' Day (2 November) falls on a Sunday this year
and my choir is going to execute the Requiem liturgically at our annual
Remembrance Mass, with organ and a single violin (for the Sanctus and
In Paradisum). I couldn't more excited (except if I were able to play
the entire Durufle Requiem, but the Offertory and Sanctus are
beyond my ken).

Nemesio

Originally posted by Nemesio
Not solemn enough?! It's transcendental! Only the Durufle has it matched
(and perhaps beaten) for its mystic quality.

As it turns out, All Souls' Day (2 November) falls on a Sunday this year
and my choir is going to execute the Requiem liturgically at our annual
Remembrance Mass, with organ and a single violin (for the Sanctus and
In Paradisum). ...[text shortened]... ay
the entire Durufle Requiem, but the Offertory and Sanctus are
beyond my ken).

Nemesio

She feels that way because Faure was French, of course. She's German.

She threw a party back when the Berlin Wall came down -- German flags all over.

Due to the long presence of American troops in Germany, at least the West Germans knew the rules of baseball quite well - so I wasn't too concerned, as some were, by reunification.

But I could not resist reminding her of a most important rule I thought apt for the occasion: 3 Reichs and you're out!!!

Originally posted by Scriabin
She feels that way because Faure was French, of course. She's German.

She threw a party back when the Berlin Wall came down -- German flags all over.

Due to the long presence of American troops in Germany, at least the West Germans knew the rules of baseball quite well - so I wasn't too concerned, as some were, by reunification.

But I could not re ...[text shortened]... ding her of a most important rule I thought apt for the occasion: 3 Reichs and you're out!!!

Oh my, thats a bad one, er good one🙂

Originally posted by Nemesio
I'm 'ABD' at the University of Pittsburgh in Hysterical Musicology. My dissertation, a scintillating
work, is about the evolution of the Mass for the Dead from the inception of written notation until
the Council of Trent.

Riveting stuff, that.

Nemesio

Are you being serious here? What is ABD? Alleged Bachelors Degree?🙂
You are in Pa? I live at the other end of the state, north of philly about 80 miles in the Pocono so-called Mountains🙂

Originally posted by sonhouse
Are you being serious here? What is ABD? Alleged Bachelors Degree?🙂
You are in Pa? I live at the other end of the state, north of philly about 80 miles in the Pocono so-called Mountains🙂

It means I almost have my PhD, that I've completed all my requirements except the document,
in this case a dissertation. It's also referred to as a 'CP' or 'Candidatus Philosophiae.'

Nemesio

Originally posted by Nemesio
It means I almost have my PhD, that I've completed all my requirements except the document,
in this case a dissertation. It's also referred to as a 'CP' or 'Candidatus Philosophiae.'

Nemesio

Well sounds like celebration time. I assume you are hard at work on it.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I assume you are hard at work on it.

Er. Well...uh...um...

Sorta 😀

Originally posted by sonhouse
Oh my, thats a bad one, er good one🙂

I think your reaction is just a conditioned reflex. Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Did anyone see the movie Brassed Off? In the flick, at rehearsal the brass-band conductor played by Pete Postlethwaite introduces Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez as “The Concerto de Orange Juice”.

I hope your dissertation is not on Rimsky-Korsakov, as I simply can't approve of any composer so avaricious and addicted to the getting and hoarding of money.

Why, Rimsky even put his greed into music, writing that infamous work The Blight of the Humble Fee.

At least Rimsky, unlike his friend Mussorgsky, didn't resort to the bottle for comfort. But Tchaikovsky, jealous of The Five, began to drink, albeit in moderation, eschewing vodka for just one Beefeaters' martini. Rimsky disparaged poor Tchaikovsky, telling Cue "You know Pytor Illich may be the darling of the crowd, but just you wait, when it comes to opera, he's fated to be known as Eugene One Gin."

Now, just remember that Edgar Allan Poe said “The goodness of your true pun is in direct ratio of its intolerability”.

I offer one more bow to forestall any violins against me by citing the great H.W. Fowler, who said:

"Puns are good, bad, and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact."