My favorite pieces of classical music

This Saturday's edition of "Howard's Day Off" was prefabricated due to my recuperation from illness, which prevented me from getting down the stairs to the Cultural Crypt to do the show live as I usually do. Instead, Hawaii Public Radio's Charles Husson brought a nice portable digital recorder over to the condo and I tannyabed my parts, handed him a stack of CDs, and he assembled it back at the studio. I sometimes play more than two dozen separate tracks on the show, but to simplify it for Charles I programmed a mere 10 pieces of music, all of them personal favorites. Which got me to thinking -- what are my top 15 classical music pieces? I'm not talking about what I might rate as the greatest pieces, but which ones would I most like to put on the CD player and hear right now. Classical music lovers will be surprised that Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner don't make the list, though I like these composers a lot. 1. Mendelssohn: Octet. (The most perfect composition I have ever heard, and composed in adolescence. A chamber work that is also a symphony, both clever and affecting, delicious to hear live but absorbing on recordings as well. No symphony or quartet is better. Although there is plenty of other Mendelssohn I like, I don't think anything else he wrote came close to this remarkable piece.) 2. Bach: Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue in G minor, BWV 542. (Bach is my favorite composer, and this is my favorite work by him. The opening fantasy, heard loud on an organ, is Bach on acid, chromatic to the point of being psychedelic. The fugue, probably written at a different time and certainly in a different mood, is a return to reality and reason, one of the best fugues by anyone at any time. The music of Bach fascinates me because other people seem to find it too arid for their tastes but I could listen to "The Art of the Fugue" or any amount of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" every day, and some people think these pieces weren't even intended for performance.) 3. Vaughan Williams: "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis." (I have never heard this live, and am told it is magical in a resonant hall like a cathedral, where the orchestra and a string quartet can answer each other from before and behind you. But even on recording this is an astonishing piece of music, like being caressed by warm waves. Ralph Vaughan Williams' music is otherwise neglected in America, and much of it is great stuff, but, yes, this is his masterpiece.) 4. Copland: "Appalachian Spring." (My fondness for the music of Copland extends to his early, more dissonant works as well as his later "Rodeo" stuff when, under the influence of communism that was all the rage before Stalin became better known, he made a conscious effort to write more stuff that the average Joe could grasp. "Appalachian Spring" is kind of in the middle, with clear themes but also an intellectual's joke, making the hymn "Simple Gifts' into something complex and bombastic. A great piece, though, especially in the original full chamber orchestra score rather than the later symphonic suite that took some interesting astringent bits out.) 5. Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor. (Many Mahler fans are choral music fans, because most of Mahler's works have voices in them. I prefer the instrumental works, and especially the Sixth, the biggest symphony ever written that holds together, full of emotion and ideas and a great piece for showing off a great orchestra. It's tragic from beginning to end, but I always feel better after listening to it. I've never figured out how Mahler did that.) 6. Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 19. (I'm not a fan of the traditional concerto in which everyone backs up one star performer and periodically sit still for solos. But this concerto has no cadenzas. It's just a marvelous piece of music that happens to have one violin playing all the time. Prokofiev is another favorite composer and I like most of his symphonies a great deal.) 7. Shostakovich: First Symphony. (I love Shostakovich's 4th, 5th and 9th symphonies, and enjoy several others, but his student work, the First, still strikes me as the best, combining the angst of his more emotional works with the wit of some of his other compositions. Intensely inventive and full of personality.) 8. Ravel: "Tombeau de Couperin." (Ravel has always struck me as one of the most successful composers of all time. Every format he tried, the result went straight into the repertory: his trio, his quartet, his ballets, his concertos, and the infamous "Bolero," much underrated even by Ravel himself. But my favorite is "Tombeau," a modern take on ancient dance movements.) 9. Schumann: "Rhenish" Symphony. (Schumann was so emotional he came unhinged, but his best music is very special, and I love the "Rhenish" Symphony for its arching opening theme, its quasi-Baroque slow movement, and its perfect finale. I have read that his orchestration is thick and needs help. All I know is, I love what I hear.) 10. Hindemith: Concert Music for Strings & Brass. (Hindemith was the 20th century Bach, prolific, and perhaps too intellectual for his own good. Many musicians dislike him because they know him mainly by the many sonatas and concertos he tossed off for students. But I like much of his work, including "Ludas Tonalis," "Mathis der Maler," the first Kammermusik and the one for woodwind ensemble, and especially the Concert Music for Strings & Brass, a highly original piece that manages to be very modern but also very listenable.) 11. Stravinsky: "Symphony of Psalms." (I like a lot of Stravinsky, including his most famous stuff, but my personal favorites are from his neo-classical period, and especially "Symphony of Psalms," a three-movement choral symphony. It's not singers backed up by an orchestra. It's an orchestra in which the violins are voices.) 12. Bartok: "Concerto for Orchestra." (Bartok was a modern composer who spent his youth studying folk music, mostly in eastern Europe, and what he heard made his own music unique. I agree with others that this was his masterpiece, and I love hearing it live or on recording. I also love his Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta and would like to hear it live the way he intended it, with percussion in the middle and string divided left and right to produce a stereo effect before there was such a thing in recordings.) 13. Beethoven: "Moonlight" Sonata. (The slow movement was part my childhood, when I was not otherwise much exposed to the classics. My mother's father could play it. The progression of movements, each one faster than the previous one, works for me better than most other sonatas. The moods of Beethoven are represented as well in this work as in any of his symphonies, of which I confess to an unnatural fondness for the Second.) 14. Brahms: Second String Sextet. (This is one of the most beautiful pieces ever composed by anybody. The opening movement is the single best example of Brahms' penchant for mixing major and minor to produce something that sounds like the end of the day. The gentle bounce of the finale is like a gallop through the clouds.) 15. Harris: Third Symphony. (Roy Harris is not a composer of the same rank as these other guys, though I have heard more of his symphonies than most people and find much to like in some of them. In the Third, however, everything came together for him and he produced what in Europe they still call the Great American Symphony. I admire its concision and love the way Harris, like Brahms, mixed major and minor to produce a mood that is hard to explain in words because it is too subtle for them.) Clearly if I had extended the list a little, I would soon have gotten to Mozart (40th Symphony) and Beethoven symphonies (Seventh, Second, Fifth -- not the Ninth, you might be surprised to read) and Tchaikovsky (secret pleasure: the "Little Russian") and Schoenberg (the two Chamber Symphonies) and Schubert (the "Unfinished," can you believe it? But also the music for "Rosamunde.") But along the way we would have had to make room for "The Planets" and Gershwin's Concerto in F and Peter Mennin's Fifth Symphony (the Juilliard president wrote the same symphony over and over but this version really works) and Paul Creston's Partita for Violin, Flute and String Orchestra and Poulenc's organ concerto and John Adams' "Shaker Loops" and Michael Torke's "Color Music." How does someone develop favorites along these lines, with no Wagner, Dvorak, Elgar, Bruckner, Handel, Richard Strauss? Simple: by being self-taught. I don't play an instrument, never attended conservatory, never took a music appreciation class. I bought LPs and then CDs, listened, and read. I went where my ears took me. Eventually I worked backward to listen to the core repertory, but not always the "right" works. I love Brahms' Third Symphony, for example, but not the Second. Everybody is supposed to like the Second. Sorry. I hope this triggers some other people to send their own lists. Maybe someone's explanation of her or his love of a particular work will make me listen to it again with fresh ears.

Comments

[John Grabowski]

Some of my favorites (in no particular order):
[And I've added some comments, too. HMD]

1. Beethoven: Third Symphony. [Roger Norrington and The London Classical Players did an original instruments performance at the much faster metronome markings Beethoven put down, and the funeral march still works. HMD]

2. Beethoven: String Quartets...well, Op. 18 Nos 1, 4, and 6, and all the rest forward, including of course the Grosse Fugue. [The Grosse Fuge sounds like a 20th century work but was written 100 years earlier. HMD]

3. Mozart: Symphonies 35, 38, 39, and 40. Funny, I don't warm to No. 36 as much as I used to and No. 41 has always been a little cold and distant to me.

4. Mozart: Sinfonia Concertante K 364.

5. Delius: Double Concerto for Violin and Cello.

6. D'Indy: String Quartet No. 2, Symphony on a French Mountain Air (but there are few good performances of either of these works).

7. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major. [A fascinating work. Instead of the usual orchestral opening, the piano starts solo. And one of the cadenzas begins with the soloist elaborating on the cadence instead of the theme, an outright joke. HMD]

8. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major.

9. Haydn: The Creation.

10. Mozart: Great Mass in C minor (far more so than the more famous Requiem).

11. Chopin: The Ballades.

12. Chopin: The Etudes.

13. Ligeti: String Quartets.

14: Ligeti: Piano Etudes.

15: Schubert: Unfinished and Great Symphonies.

16. Bach: All the Violin Concerti, just for starters.

17. Debussy: Preludes.

18. Debussy: La Mer. [Debussy's orchestral music is richly rewarding. HMD]

19. Mahler: Symphony No. 2.

20: Mahler: Symphony No. 9.

...And I'm just scratching the surface.

[Good job, John! An intriguing list! I need to go listen to the Ligeti works. HMD]

[Kgmbviewer]

Concerning Mr. Dicus' comments on Beethoven's 9th symphony, I agree.

Considering how it is supposed to speak to the humanity in all of us, it just doesn't do a whole lot for me.

I had a friend who had the entire Phillips Mozart edition and he once played something from it that sounded just like the ODE TO JOY.

[James Petersen]

My son spent the last 12 months at Interlochen (IAC '08, IAA '09) and that experience, interestingly, broadened my tastes. While Bach (JS) is also my favorite, I've learned to appreciate such works as:

Barber- 2nd Essay (really interesting when the conductor forgets to show up and the Interlochen Orchestra just plays without him)

Mosolov - The Iron Foundry and Shostokovich - Symphony 12 - gritty, unrepentant gray soviet representations of life.

Lalo cello Concerto Dm- remarkably lyrical piece

Saint-Saens cello Concerto Am- ditto

Copland- This Tender Land "The Promise of Living" Copland is my favorite American composer but I had never listened to this! TPoL is incredibly complex and difficult piece to sing. (IAA Choir performed for Festival Week 09)

Mahler 8th - My son's girlfriend, a gifted soprano, tore a back muscle (honest!) performing this piece.