As to Quarantine Time Reassessments, for my own part after listening more to some music podcasts I’ve discovered that I enjoy (19th c) Italian opera, which I never thought I did. My whole opera collection was, I think, Prokofiev, Mozart, Bridge, Schoenberg, Sessions, Havergal Brian, Wagner.. (and I have heard Carmen and various G & S live, the latter especially with pleasure. I’m surprised my adored Sondheim, lord of the showtune pattersong, doesn’t seem to care for the latter...) . no Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini, ... then recently I downloaded “Rita” and a few others and :)!!
Responding to:
Australia has been in various phases of lockdown since March and I've used this time as an opportunity to get my stories into a publishable state, indeed, I have been prolific, writing fifteen stories, most of them re-writes.
It has also given me an opportunity to assess the music I listen to. I have literally - to my wife's utter chagrin- thousands of CDs, and while moving about a thousand of them to allow painters to do some essential paintwork, I kept finding CDs I had no idea I owned.
It turns out that in the end, I find most of my listening is directed towards not that many composers. I have, for example, had a long-held Pantheon of the Greatest, a list of nine, then about fifteen or so who are close or near-about, and I also have a list of composers who I have explored and found to almost dislike. I also have a list of musicians who I revere, those who I find okay, and the ones who drive me nuts.
First, The Pantheon.Or, Mount Olympus.
Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Schubert, Mozart, Handel, Wagner, Haydn.
One step or so below:
Mahler, Schumann, Janacek, Shostakovich, Berlioz, Monteverdi, Telemann, Debussy, Fasch, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Britten, Ravel, Rameau, Schutz, Buxtehude, Bartok, Verdi, Chopin, Neilsen, Sibelius, Vivaldi,Prokofiev, Rachmaninov.
Modern music, you ask? Well, I have all of Schoenberg's, Webern's and Berg's works and only play Webern and Berg. Schoenberg makes my skin crawl. But we'll get to that.
I also like Vaughan Williams, Szymanowski, Smetana, Soler, Weiss, Rodrigo, Villa Lobos, Toch, Bloch, Tippet, Couperin, Granados, Mompou, Albeniz, Boccherini, the Bach sons, Biber, Zelenka and Veracini, Part, Tubin, Martinu, the latter very much.
I dislike:
Liszt.
Mendelssohn
Milhaud.
Opera is a blind spot for me. I grew up in a household where opera meant the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhauser and the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco. Though my father read Dostoevsky through to Patrick White, the 'Theatre' in our kitchen and lounge rooms revolved around the normal suburban dramas of a family of five, parents who worked their butts off and three children who were immigrants trying to come to terms with their new language, their new culture and a climate which bordered on the extreme of very cold and very hot.
Add to this goulash of cultural clash and adjustment was the disparity between my mother's Volksdeutscher background and my father's 'echt' German - Leipzig born - origins (though it turns out that via his Silesian born mother, there was Polish ancestry as well) . So there was a theatre and drama aplenty, we didn't need Aeschylus nor Sophocles, we could create tragedy, comedy and drama over a laminex table which rattled when my father banged his fists on it to make a point about the stupidity of Australian Politicians, never mind the drama which goes down in very kitchen about who shall dry and who shall wash the dishes.
What I'm getting at is that, Opera is a blind spot. I own all of the Verdi Operas, all of Wagners, the great Mozart, nearly all of Handel, most of Rameau - who apparently went out with a girl called Juliet - Berlioz, even Massenet, even Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, Schubert even, and the only ones I ever play for some reason are the Handel.
Musicians who speak to me:
Kurt, Thomas and Michael Sanderling, Klemperer, Furtwangler, Jochum, Giulini, Arrau, Richter, Uchida, Colin Davis, Kondrashin, Oistrakh, Richter - both Karl and the German Russian - Gerd Albrecht, Ancerl, Neumann, Moravec, Barbirolli, Skrowascewski, Tennstedt, Barshai, Gilels, Harnoncourt apart from his Bach Cantatas, reason enough to have him executed, Berntein in everything except Mahler, I could go on, the list is very big.
Those who don't speak to me:
Norrington, Solti, Abbado, Rattle, Heifetz, Chailly, Toscanini, Pollini, Mravinsky, The Amadeus Quartet, Neville Marriner.
The neutrals who I respect very much but find it difficult to 'get into'. I buy their recordings and like some of them, others leave me a bit cold:
Barenboim, Masur, Haitink, Blomstedt, Previn, Ashkenazy, Dohnanyi,Paul Lewis, Alfred Brendel, Ormandy, Szell, Nelsons, Vanska, Emerson Quartet.
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Len Mullenger - Founder of MusicWeb