Recommend classical Music

[KvHagedorn]

ugh.. the Slavonic Dances are annoying, but Dvorak's last three symphonies are good.

Besides the Missa Solemnis (and of course the Ninth Symphony), which I already recomended, some other great Beethoven works of his later period are the Sonata op. 106, "Hammerklavier" and the String Quartet #14. The latter was orchestrated for full string orchestra by Koussevitsky, adding double basses. I have a recording of this done by Leonard Bernstein that is pretty impressive. Really, most late Beethoven is fascinating, deep music.

Other works for string orchestra I like are Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (originally for string quartet).

Almost anything by Grieg is wonderful.. I like the Two Elegiac Melodies a lot. He also wrote many songs which are very beautiful. Sibelius is another favorite. His Four Legends from the Kalevala, the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Symphonies, and the Violin Concerto are excellent. Rachmaninoff is another favorite. His Piano Concertos are well known, but equally great are his Symphony #2, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and the symphonic poem Isle of the Dead. If you can find any of these conducted by Eugene Ormandy, get them. Ormandy was one of the very best conductors ever, but sadly is already almost forgotten. I have an old mono recording he did of Isle of the Dead (which will probably never be re-released) which is just a flawless performance. Until you hear other interpretations, you don't quite appreciate how perfect Ormandy's were. Vladimir Ashkenazy has proven to be a good Rachmaninoff conductor though. If you can't find Ormandy's recordings, his are pretty decent.

Other recordings I would recommend:

Mahler's Symphony #9, live recording by Karajan.

Wagner's Tristan und Isolde recorded by Böhm at the Bayreuth festival.

Sibelius' complete symphonies by Colin Davis.

Bruckner's Symphony #4 recorded by Ormandy and his Symphony#7 by Karajan (older analog 70's version is better).

Anything recorded by Fürtwängler. His Beethoven symphonies and Tristan und Isolde are legendary.

[gt40]

One of my favourite cd's
Stravinsky, The firebird / Borodin , Music from Prince Igor

[Brian R.]

Maria Callas performance of Tosca by Puccini

Bach - St. John's Passion

Pablo Casals performance of Bach Cello Suites

Glenn Gould performing any Bach keyboard music

Artur Rubinstein performing any Chopin

Enrico Caruso singing anything

Karajan and Pavarotti doing Madama Butterfly by Puccini

Kathleen Battle singing Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro) by Mozart

Beethoven late String Quartets, particularly Op131

Mahler Symphony No.2

Kirsten Flagstad singing anything, particularly with Furtwangler in Tristan und Isolde by Wagner

[KvHagedorn]

Originally posted by gt40
One of my favourite cd's
Stravinsky, The firebird / Borodin , Music from Prince Igor

Is that the Telarc CD? #80039 or something? That's a pretty awesome recording.. one of the very first digital masters released. I remember when it was only available on LP, hearing the Polovtsian Dances from that one in a stereo shop. The bass drum thwacks shook the cinder block walls!

Of course, the speakers were pretty special.. IMF SACMs. $4600.00/pr with huge transmission-line enclosures. That was the most awesomely deep, clean bass I have ever heard in my life.

[Brian Ellis]

I've a pair of 35-year old Goodman speakers which I bought new and wouldn't swap for all the tea in China. They were excellent with a KT-66 push-pull Williamson amplifier system, but since I moved to a Class A semiconductor amplifier, they have become stupendous. Why? Because they have a 15 ohm impedance and the Class A has an output impedance of <0.1 ohms. This has improved the damping so that there are now virtually no resonances between subsonic, up to ultrasonic, and a flat response curve for the limits of my elderly ears (I've lost from about 18 kHz, 50 years ago, down to 13 kHz today, using Fletcher and Munsen audiometry )

If I play Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor or the 1812 at real cathedral or concert hall levels, these speakers are not a patch on anything affordable today. They are real gut-wrenchers, if you know what I mean

[gt40]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
[B]Is that the Telarc CD? #80039

Bang on!
excellent CD, but it requires a hell of alot od dynamic range from your system.

[Topha]

The soundtrack for The Man who wasn't there (awesome movie) is mostly great beethoven music

[GNEP]

Mahler #5 is always a good one.

Any of Beethoven's piano sonatas.

Bach cello suites - especially the Jaqueline du Pre recordings.

I get lots of exposure to Handel and other Baroque as my brother is a professional cellist specialising in the baroque period... so I also grew up with him practising at all hours.

Here are some recordings he's taken part in recently:

Bach: St Matthew Passion (here)
Vivaldi: La Stravaganza (here)

Personally, I find some of the stuff he does a little, erm, lengthy (or that may be because most of the concert halls in London he plays at when over here have really uncomfortable seats...) But you have to give him a plug, eh?

[Jammrock]

Originally posted by [GDI]Raptor
The whole Peer Gynt Suite from Edvard Grieg is very nice, epecialy "Solveigs Sang"

Amen brother! But you have to get the vocal edition to truly hear the full genious that is the Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite no. 1 and 2. "Solveig's Sang" is truly one of the greatest peices of female vocal music ever written. Deutsche Grammofon has an excellent Peer Gynt Suite 1 and 2 with vocals:

http://www.iclassics.com/iclassics/album.jsp?selectionId=2418

Best recording of Peer Gynt I have ever heard.

As for the rest:

Carl Orff - Carmina Burana
Mozart - Requiem
Beethoven - Symphony No. 3, 5 and 9
Camille Saint-Saens - Symphony No. 3 (a.k.a. "The Organ Symphony", wonderful piece, need to listen to at HIGH volumes)
Respighi - Belkis, Queen of Sheeba
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite
Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade
Wagner - Die Gutterdomerung (opera)
Schubert - Piano Sonota in A minor
McDowell - Piano Concerto #2
Handel - Messiah
Schubert - Ave Maria
Smetana - The Moldau (such a beautiful and relaxing piece)

There's more, but those come off the top of my head as the most exceptional pieces of classical music.

KvH:

Here's a huge list of Ormany recordings on CD:

http://www.iclassics.com/homepage.jsp/iclassics/artists_result.jsp?entityId=712

Jammrock

[KvHagedorn]

Originally posted by Jammrock

KvH:

Here's a huge list of Ormany recordings on CD:

http://www.iclassics.com/homepage.jsp/iclassics/artists_result.jsp?entityId=712

Jammrock

That's not really huge compared to the number of recordings he made during his 40+ year stint with the Philadelphia Orchestra. I remember hearing at one time that he had made more recordings than any other conductor. Most were for Columbia (now Sony) and RCA, though he did a few exceptional EMI releases at the end of his career. I did a search and there are actually some good websites for him. Here's a discography, in fact:

http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/1471/ormandy_disk_e.html

another good Ormandy site:

http://www.flash.net/~park29/ormandy.htm

and another:

http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/ormandy/toc.html

more on his recordings:

http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/ormandy/record.html

Believe it or not, I have all three of the pictured LPs.

[Jammrock]

I should look through my grandpa's 1000 or so reel-to-reel recordings (taken from radio broadcasts from the 60's to the 80's) and see what he has. I bet he's got a few Ormandy recordings.

One of these days I'll get around to digitally recording and mastering those reel-to-reel monstrosities.

Jammrock

[KvHagedorn]

This is hilarious:

http://paul.merton.ox.ac.uk/music/ormandy.html

My favorite (because it is accidentally quite profound):

Muti is going to do the Alpine Symphony this year. He will do it well because it is not very well known.

[Muad'Dib]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
(I've lost from about 18 kHz, 50 years ago, down to 13 kHz today, using Fletcher and Munsen audiometry )

Elaborate on Fletcher and Munsen audiometry please. I know them only from their hearing science/acoustic theory research. In particular, the critical bandwidth concept for standard audiometric frequencies 250 - 8kHz including interoctaves.

Sorry - that was relatively off topic.

Classical recomendations on my part to keep things goin on topic:

Guitar:
John Williams - the Seville Concert SK 53 359 (An EXCELLENT recording as well)
Christopher Parkening - In the Spanish Style EMI CDC-7 47194 2 (not as good a recording)
Orchestral (aside from previously mentioned "stuff"):
Copland in particular the Eiji Oue/Minnesota Orchestra recording by Reference Recordings
Kabalevsky - Colas Breugnon Overture
Ravel Bolero is another of my favorites
I'm a big fan of Gliere and Rossini as well.

[Muad'Dib]

Apperantly I haven't lost that ability to kill a thread the instant that I post...

[Brian Ellis]

F&M were the original researchers who plotted the thresholds of hearing and of pain throughout the whole audio band from, I believe, 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and discovered the threshold of hearing required higher levels at higher frequencies as age advanced, relative to the middle and low frequencies.

I agree that commercial pure-tone audiometers, which were introduced in the 1930s, over 10 years after their research, have a restricted frequency range, as most of the energy in speech is restricted to the frequency range you mention. However, some fifth and seventh order harmonics from musical instruments enter into the 10 - 20 kHz range and loss of hearing at the higher frequencies can alter the perception of colour of violins, baroque trumpets and some other instruments, including the snare drum, believe it or not. If you have an equaliser which goes up to this range, just reduce these frequencies by 20 or 30 dB to get the effect of age

Interestingly, Fletcher also discovered that in young people, the threshold of hearing at 15 kHz was lower than at 10 kHz: there is a distinct dip of about 10 dB in sensitivity at ~ 9-10 kHz and this has never been explained. This may be the reason why ordinary medical audiometry does not usually go beyond 8 kHz, so as not to have irrelevant data that could be misinterpreted.

Of course, he never worked with the Hz: in his heyday at Bell Labs, in the late 10s and early 20s, frequency was measured in c/s!

BTW, did you know that Fletcher was a Mormon? Totally irrelevant, of course, but the human side of great scientists is also interesting. He died a few weeks short of his 97th birthday.