Most beautiful pieces in classical music ?
Posted by: pz on 12 February 2012
Dear Mates,
What do you like most ?
Dear Chords,
I watched your youtube link and some more films from the same concert. "Lovely."
But there is something about the both stark and joyful JS Bach which appeals at a very deep level to me. The counterpoint does not require analysis for it to be most involving for me. It allows for a variety of listening paterns, from listening as is if I had never heard the music before, or a more analytical way where I actually listen very carefully to the musical voices, phrases, and lines of counterpoint to see how these fit with the opening theme on which it all tends to be derived ...
Not everyone would want to listen this way, but it is a sort of meditation for me! Walcha makes these things both clear and humane on the organ for example ...
ATB from George
In the case of JS Bach is what he learned from Vivaldi and Marcello! To transcribe works by these fairly contemporay Italians was a labour of love!
To perform them in public, a massive compliment!
ATB from George
I am not fan of J.S.Bach - pls sorry if you love his works.
Very strict and counterpoint-centered; always a metronom in the background.
Rather Monteverdi - another level for me.
There is a famous Hungarian film based on a very interesting music-theoretical topic 'Wercmeister Harmonies'.
Fact, that J.S.Bach worked with Andreas Wercmeister; their result was a 'Wohltemperiert Scale' - means nowaday's accords and lines.
The problem is:
Dear Chords!
BRAVO!
Keyboard tuning is a compromise! All schemes fail. The sung note or that played on strings is pure and observes the real temperament of tuning! The intervals are preserved!
I played the double bass as a professional, and am fully aware of the compromise when one plays in the continuo with a harpsichord!
As for the metronomic aspect in the performance of JS Bach, I totally agree that only a poor performance of the music [most unfortunately] gives one the un-easy feeling of wooden and false procession of the pulse, but the greatest of Bach performances can and do avoid this very big trap.
In that sense Adolf Busch is a master not yet equalled in the orchestra of Bach's works, and though the tuning is false, Helmut Walcha also never fails to yield to the rhetoric and emotion of the greatest counterpoint in the keyboard works. Harpsichord or Organ.
No problem that that you have hit on the two potential weaknesses of Bach's works, but he would not have made a wooden or metronomic performance, and his experiments with tuning the keyboard to allow the "higher" [sharp or flat] keys to be employed are fascinating, but sadly led to atonal-ism, which is the worst example of the triumph of intellectualism over nature that music has yet conspired!
ATB from George
In my list would be the Schubert String Quintet in C Maj. Especially the first 2 movements.
Kapsberger - not very known but excellent early Baroque composer.
This disc one of the best 'turning-to-Early-Music' record; outstanding jazzy approach.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6PDhri2ILI
(pls note modulation on 1:30 - J.S.Bach wouldn't have let it...
)
