Buying Western Classical Music

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quad

Thanks. I really appreciate your appreciation :)

A couple of days ago I received the DG box set of Carlos Kleiber.

Carlos Kleiber - Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon: Carlos Kleiber: Amazon.co.uk: Music

I was very excited about these recordings and they have indeed turned out to be marvelous. Carlos Kleiber's recordings of Beethoven's 5/7, Schubert's 3/8 and Brahm's 4 truly deserves their hall of fame reputation. All of them are among the finest versions of these symphonies ever recorded. These recordings are from the late 70's and the sound quality is excellent. This box set comprising of all the recordings Kleiber made for DG has 12 CD's. The first three CD's are of the symphonies mentioned above. The other 9 CD's contain 4 opera's. Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, Verdi's La Treviata, Strauss 2's Die Fledermaus and Weber's Der Freischutz. I have never got down to listening to or enjoying opera although I have many recordings. I am hoping that Carlos Kleiber will make me an opera buff :)

The single CD's of Beethoven 5/7 and Brahms 4 are available for less than 4 pounds each and should be grabbed immediately. The Schubert is quite expensive!

Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7: Ludwig van Beethoven, Carlos Kleiber, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, C. VPO/Kleiber: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Brahms: Symphony No.4: Wiener Philharmoniker, Carlos Kleiber: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Schubert: Symphonies Nos 3 & 8: Franz Schubert, Carlos Kleiber, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra: Amazon.co.uk: Music
 
ajay124 said:
arnprasad

Your reaction to the music of Shostakovich is understandable. I feel the same way about some music when I first hear it. Music which is too complex or depressing is (at least initially) a turn off. When I began listening to classical music, for many years I was primarily listening to the popular works of a handful of composers like Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Handel, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak etc. I bought a few tape's/cd's of modern composer like Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Mahler but I never played them for more than 10 minutes. Their music confused me, depressed me, made me feel uneasy. The sensation was akin to falling into a dark void or entering a night without end. The sense of peace, beauty and transcendence I felt while listening to classical composers was replaced by horror, anxiety and confusion.

There is no rule book or a best way of listening to music. It is perfectly fine to only listen to music which provides relaxation and pleasure. And it is perfectly fine to listen to music which (at least initially) provides tension, fear and despair. It depends on individual temperaments. Personally I enjoy both happy and playful music as well as depressing and complex music. But my natural tendency is towards depressing and complex music, books and cinema. Maybe I am a pessimist. Or a realist. We become what we are when we are very young. We can't help it. Or change it. There was no one in my family or environment who read the books, watched the films or heard the music that I did. The first person I met who thought like me, felt like me, and liked the same books, music and cinema was a girl. I proposed to her and fortunately she accepted :)
Click to expand...

Full Filmy Story:ohyeah: congrats
 
though i am not a great lover of western classical music i follow this thread with interest...
in my head (it's just me) there are stereotypical images of classical composers..mozart (melodic), wagner (rich and extravagant) chopin (moody, introspective etc)...and SCHOENBERG (difficult)..recently i read an interesting review of a Schoenberg biography (ARNOLD SCHOENBERG by Bujan Bulic))...
i am sharing an extract which i thought was quite enlightening and revealing about the kind of mental process that goes behind the 'creation' of some types of classical music...
".....With a work on this scale, Schoenberg felt that the expression of emotion was no longer a sufficient structuring principle: he was worried that long passages of atonality would be too daunting without a sense of logic behind them. Serialism, and the 12-tone method, was the solution he came up with. Ironically, given its reputation for producing difficult music, serialism was a way, Schoenberg said, of providing comprehensibility. His idea was to use a melodic line in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale were sounded just once: that way, no pitch was more important than another, there was no tonic or dominant. Variations on the melodic line could be produced by playing it backwards (in retrograde), upside-down, or by transposing it to a different set of pitches. Music composed in this way would possess a sense of unity, as each melodic phrase would be closely related to the others: in his famous essay, Composition with 12 Tones, he compares serialist composition to Swedenborgs idea of heaven, a place where there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward. He was delighted with the breakthrough and wrote to Alma Mahler in 1922 that the German Aryans who persecuted me in Mattsee will have this new thing to thank for the fact that they belong to the state that has secured hegemony for itself in the field of music. With the theoretical machinery in place, the pieces flew off the production line: a Serenade (Op. 24), a Suite for Piano (Op. 25), the somewhat long-winded Wind Quintet (Op. 26) and the masterly Suite (Op. 29) for three clarinets, two violins, viola and piano. Both Webern and Berg followed him in embracing serialism, an alternative to expressionism, a way of reining in atonality without going back to old formal rules."
 
moktan

The stereotypical images of various composers in my head :)

Mozart Spontaneity. Innocence. Childlike Happiness. God's chosen one.
Beethoven Genius. Mt. Everest. Maelstorm. Loss of hearing.
Bach Einstein. Logic. Mathematics. Perfection. Divinity.
Haydn Classical, Industrious, Humility. Happiness.
Schubert Unfinished. Supremely Talented. Untimely Death.
Brahms/Schumann/Chopin/Mendelssohn Beautiful. Darkly Romantic. Love.
Shostakovich Fear. Anxiety. Master And Margarita. The Possessed.
Mahler WW1&2. Hiroshima. Democracy. Modern. Twentieth Century.
 
ajay124 said:
The stereotypical images of various composers in my head :)
Bach Einstein. Logic. Mathematics. Perfection. Divinity.
Click to expand...

Interesting. To quote Castel (circa 1763): " Can one imagine anything in the arts which would surpass the visual rendering of sound, which would enable the eyes to partake all the pleasures which music gives to the ears?".
Paul Klee, a trained violinist, invented a draughtsman's language for Bach's fugue structure. His watercolour Fugue in Red (1921) is the closest imaginable experience of listening to a Bach fugue, its echoing forms cut and pasted on top of one another, each a shadow of the previous one in carefully pitched chromatic gradations.
717bg.jpg
 
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interestingly from the review quoted earlier.....

"Schoenbergs work and his rhetoric, in the years running up to the First World War, can seem to contradict each other. He claimed that he was working towards complete liberation from all forms and that he had embraced atonality because he wanted his music to be independent, not only from the material world, but from music theory itself, from the system of keys, scales, sharps and flats. Yet the pieces he composed at this time were mystical, richly symbolic and emotionally charged, hardly pure mathematics. For him, abstraction in music was about implying a meta-language, a layer of symbols behind the material world: in the first decade of the 20th century that was provided by the newly excavated unconscious. In 1909, inspired by Freud, he started work on Erwartung, a one-act opera about a woman in a state of hysteria, in which a solo soprano wanders through an expressionistic projection of her mind the staging demanded a dark forest lit by a blood-red moon until she finds her lovers corpse. When she realises she cant revive him she accuses him of infidelity, before stalking off into the night. Die glckliche Hand, a Drama mit Musik composed between 1910 and 1913, is an interpretation, informed by Otto Weiningers Sex and Character, of Mathildes affair with Gerstl. A man sings about his love for a woman while she slopes off with a well-dressed stranger; when she returns, contrite, he forgives her and then she runs off again, kicking a stone at him as she leaves."
 
Mathilde it seems was the sister of Shoenberg's childhood friend Zemlinsky (from whom the master learnt the rudiments of his music and who helped him in his entry into the musical circles of those times).
he later married her only to find that, even though pregnant with Shoenberg's child,she had been having an affair with Gersti a photograph credited with an unflattering portrait of the maestro (one that pictured him as a hard to please stoic man) . They eloped.
However...
Mathilde came back. Gersti committed suicide. and Shoenberg wrote that music.
Ah women! Ah men! Ah musicians!
 
This thread was instrumental in rekindling my interest in classical music. I brought my first Classical CD set on Ajay's recommendation. Although I have not bought any further CD's, I have been listening to classical music via youtube or classical radio and I can see myself listening to it even more once I have my system in place.

So, to borrow from Frasier, a sitcom on TV, "Am listening" !!! (and reading every post in this thread too) :)
 
Hi,
This is regarding purchasing CDs.

I usually purchase classical cds from PRESTOCLASSICAL.COM. There is a huge amount of collections and you can consult them for recommendations etc. But I don,t know the cost difference when comparing with AMAZON or EBAY. Please share your opinions.
with cheer.
 
Presto Classical - Buy classical CDs, opera CDs, & DVDs online

Presto Classical is the best online website for buying music that I have come across. It only lists western classical music. It carries most well known labels. It does not dabble with unknown 'audiophile' labels, trying to sell music at a huge premium by claiming some mystical improvements in audio quality. The pricing is very fair and on par with Amazon UK. There is a huge catalogue of music with fairly comprehensive information about the recordings. It is possible to browse for music based on label, composer, conductor, orchestra, artist, single CD's, box sets etc. The interface for browsing and buying music is extremely smooth and simple. Prospective buyers are left alone to choose for themselves. They are not attacked with advertisements and recommendations.

Unfortunately my very first order from them got misplaced, therefore I went
back to ordering from Amazon. But after I had not received the parcel in the period mentioned by them ( I think it was 30 days ) I requested a refund which was promptly given. If their deliveries are prompt and reliable, then it would be a great place to buy western classical music.
 
I have waited a long time for the music of Wilhelm Furtwangler. Since the early 90's I have been familiar with his reputation as perhaps the greatest maestro of our times. I even had a recording on cassette of his Beethoven's 9th and Tchaikovsky's 6th. Recordings I seldom played because of the bad sound. I have shied away from buying CD's of his monaural recordings made between 1930-1955. I have read that some Binaural recordings exist from the 40's, but I have not come across them. I have very few recordings by the legendary conductors from the period 1930-1960. Wilhelm Furtwangler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Arturo Toscanini, Jascha Horenstein, Erich Kleiber, Leopold Stokowski, Thomas Beecham, George Szell, Kirill Kondrashin and Yuri Temirkanov. Most of the recordings I have are by conductors and musicians who recorded after 1960. I have read many accounts by old timers who insist that even though sound technology may have improved since the 1960's, but the great performances happened before this era.

Recently I have started acquiring music from the pre 1960's years. David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz, Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Mstislav Rostropovich opened the floodgates for me. I bought their recordings, and quite simply I have seldom heard music of this quality before. The Furtwangler 21 CD set is even better. I have waited for a few days, after receiving this set, before writing this post. I wanted to hear most of the CD's before forming an opinion. Now that I have played 8-10 CD's, I truly feel that this is the greatest music I have ever heard! So many conductors and orchestras have recorded these symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Tchaikovsky. I have an SACD set of Beethoven's 9 symphonies recorded in the 21st century by one of the best conductors and orchestra of the present time. It has many qualities which would please audiophiles. Even the slightly novel interpretation of the symphonies is not bad. But compared to the 1950's Furtwangler/Wiener Philharmoniker performances of Beethoven and Brahms, many modern recordings sound banal and lifeless. (Carlos Kleiber is an exception! His Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner and Schubert is extraordinary). The live recordings made by Furtwangler with the Berlin Philharmoniker in the 1940's are supposed to be even better than the studio recordings he made in the 1950's with Weiner Philharmoniker. The sound quality of these war time recordings is not supposed to be very good. Plenty of ambient noise and hiss. But the music is said to be sensational! Having tasted the magical, musical feast prepared by Furtwangler, I intend to buy many more of his legendary recordings.

More than anything else, these primarily mono recordings by Furtwangler, Oistrakh and Richter have convinced me that great music transcends time and space. Personally I have come across very little music made in the west which can stand up to these memorable recordings. The sound quality on the Furtwangler set is much better than what I had expected. The Furtwangler society and many other reviewers do not seem to be impressed with the remastering efforts of DG or EMI. They feel that the Furtwangler CD's released by these labels are heavily filtered and have reduced dynamics. Many fans seem to put their faith in the sound engineers of niche labels like Tahra, Music & Arts and Audite. But these labels are offering a few recordings at premium prices. The comprehensive EMI box of 21 CD's for 2995 was too good to resist. Personally I am very happy with the sound quality. It is definitely not very good but it's not bad. Barring a few performances from the late 30's and 40's, most of the CD's have a decent sound. Many of these recordings were remastered by Abbey Roads sound engineers in 2011 for a Japanese SACD release. These red book CD's seem to have benefited from this latest remastering

Wilhelm Furtwangler-The Great EMI Recordings Rhythm House | Buy Online Music CD

Beethoven: Symphonies No. 3 5 6 7 8: Wilhelm Furtwangler: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Edition Wilhelm Furtwangler - The Complete RIAS Recordings: Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra;Yehudi Menuhin;Gerhard Taschner, Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Gluck, Strauss, Weber, Wagner, Handel et al, Wilhelm Furtwangler: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Furtwangler Conducts Beethoven - Beethoven: symphonies no 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 9, Leonore & Coriolan overtures: Wilhelm Furtwangler: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Furtwangler: Live Recordings 1942-1944 Vol. 1: Wilhelm Furtwangler, Berlin Philharmonic: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Furtwangler: Live Recordings 1942-1944 Vol. 2: Brahms/Schumann/Bruckner/R. Straus, Berlin Philharmonic: Amazon.co.uk: Music

The Legacy (107CD): Wilhelm Furtwangler, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wilhelm Furtwngler, Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, Chorus & Orchestra of Milan Scala, Bayreuth Festival Chorus & Orches

Sviatoslav Richter - Icon: Sviatoslav Richter: Amazon.co.uk: Music

David Oistrakh - Complete EMI Recordings: David Oistrakh: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Furtw?ngler's recordings : SWF's best choice

Abbey Road engineer Simon Gibson on remastering Furtwangler - YouTube
 
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Ajay..recalling your earlier post discussing mathematics and music here is one from mathematician and musician Milton Babbitt...
"Who cares if you listen?" (1958) by composer Milton Babbitt.
http://courses.unt.edu/jklein/files/babbitt.pdf
an old essay and one may or not agree with the point of view presented but at least i found it highly illuminating and provocative. perhaps aimed to be a riposte against those, who unable to fathom the 'serious' music of Babbitt, were dismissive about it- it also provides every serious listener a profound window into the machinery of modern music.

excerpt:
"The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand works..in mathematics,philosophy and physics. Advanced music , to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his backgrounds in other fields.
But to this a double standard is invoked, with the words "music is music" implying that "music is just music". Why not then equate the activities of the radio repairman with those of the theoretical physicist , on the basis of the dictum that "physics is physics"?.."
 
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moktan

Milton Babbit seems to love convoluted sentences and ideas. Made my head spin :) But I agree that the process of learning to understand and appreciate music or cinema is similar to the process of learning to understand physics, chemistry, maths or history. It comes with time, dedication and aptitude. People are drawn towards a particular subject with varying degrees of intensity. Personally I feel (and know that it will not happen) that the importance given to science and technology in school and college education needs to be curtailed, while the importance given to history, literature, music, cinema, painting needs to be considerably enhanced. Students have an x amount of time on their hands. The time devoted to the arts has been shrinking over the years and perhaps the current generations of kids growing up all over the world can be called the 'artless' generation.

quad

"humans are more robotic than machines. The question, Cope says, isnt whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.

Most human beings may find it difficult to cope with this hypothesis :)
 
Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well Tempered Clavier is considered to be one of the highest peaks in western music. Book 1 has preludes and fugues in all the 24 major and minor keys. Later Bach composed another set of 24 preludes and fugues and called it Book 2. The complete recordings of WTC (Book 1&2) are usually available on 4 CD's. Recordings of only Book 1 or Book 2 are available on 2 CD sets. Tatiana Nikolayeva's recordings of the entire set are considered to be among the greatest. But prices being quoted for this 4 CD set are not within my budget. Some other well known recordings are by Sviatoslav Richter, Maurizio Pollini, Rosalyn Tureck, Glenn Gould, Freidrich Gulda and Angela Hewitt. If anybody is interested in acquiring one recording, I would suggest the Sviatoslav Richter 4 CD set on RCA (1992), or the remastered 2CD set of Book 1 on Sony (2004). Another option would be to buy Book 1 by Richter and Book 2 by another pianist. Angela Hewitt's version is the most recent and would probably have the best sound quality.

Bach - WTC II (Angela Hewitt) - Prelude & Fugue No. 13 in F-Sharp Major BWV 882 - YouTube

Bach - Well Tempered Clavier - Tatiana Nikolayeva (4 CD Set) (UK Import): Tatiana Nikolayeva, Johann Sebastian Bach: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Well-Tempered Clavier: J.S. Bach: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier Book I: Sviatoslav Richter, Johann Sebastian Bach: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach, J.S.: The well-tempered Clavier: Maurizio Pollini: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach: The Well-tempered Clavier: Angela Hewitt, Johann Sebastian Bach, None: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach: The Well-tempered Clavier, Book 1. Preludes and Fugues 1-8: Glenn Gould, Johann Sebastian Bach: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 878-885: Glenn Gould, Johann Sebastian Bach: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach, Js : Well-Tempered Clavier Books 1 & 2: Daniel Barenboim: Amazon.co.uk: Music

J.S. Bach-the Well Tempered Clavier: Rosalyn Tureck: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach, J.S.: The Well-tempered Clavier Bk I: Friedrich Gulda: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Bach, J.S.: The Well-tempered Clavier, Book 2: Friedrich Gulda: Amazon.co.uk: Music
 
Amit

The Blue Danube Waltz was composed by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss 2 in the nineteenth century. Among his other famous waltzes and polkas are: Tales From The Vienna Woods, Roses From The South, Viennese Spirit, Wine, Women & Song, Pizzicato Polka and Champagne Polka. Strauss 2 also composed the famous opera Die Fledermaus (The Bat). I could not find any recordings on the Rhythm House site but there are a few CD's available from Flipkart and Amazon UK. Some famous recordings of these waltzes are by Willi Boskovsky/Weiner Philharmoniker, Herbert Von Karajan/Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert Von Karajan/Weiner Philharmoniker.

Blue danube Music: Buy in India @ Flipkart.com

J Strauss: Waltzes/Blue Danube: Johann II Strauss: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Waltzes and Polkas: J. Strauss: Amazon.co.uk: Music

Johann Strauss & Josef Strauss: Waltzes & Polkas: Johann Strauss, Josef Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra: Amazon.co.uk: Music
 
amitk777 said:
Ajay,

Just learning , but have got very fond of Blue Danube, can you suggest a CD which I can buy in India ?

Thx
Amit
Click to expand...

Amit, you can start to learn classical music from Alexander Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Bruckner Symphonies....I learned classical music since age 3 and my parents always thought from the toughest composers...you have to understand every pieces of the symphony in order to enjoy it...you have to be able to imagine during the composer time....if you know how to do it then you will be able to enjoy it...
 
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