Some help with classical music

There are three composers:

One was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart

George Frederic Handel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frideric_Handel

Johann Sebastian Bach

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach


Samuel Barber lived much later than the other three:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Barber

Here is an album to start you off in the same vein as Barber. Listen especially to Crisentemi by Puccini.

http://www.amazon.com/Emerson-Encores-String-Quartet/dp/B00006AKUX/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1196102984&sr=1-1

If you enjoy Samuel Barber, i would recommend to you some of his contemporaries and near contemporaries--Rafe (or Ralph) Von Williams (especially The Lark Ascending), Jan (or Jean) Sibelius and Sergei Rachmaninoff. You might also enjoy Sergei Prokofiev.

I'm not terribly fond of the Baroque composers--so i can take or leave Bach, Telemann, Handel and their contemporaries. I greatly admire Mozart and Haydn, who were classical composers. Beethoven spans the transition from the Classical to the Romantic Era (and is credited by many with founding the Romantic movement in music), although i've grown tired of him. More than many other composers, he seems to have recycled a great many of his musical themes (Mozart was guilty of that, too, but with more than 600 compositions completed in his brief life, it is far less of an issue).

In the Romantic era, i would list Franz Schubert, Antonín Dvorák and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as my favorites (in no particular order), and then Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Camille Saint-Saëns, Alexander Borodin, Bedrich Smetana, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov--the list just goes on and on, and i can't recall all of them. I was not impressed with that old humbug Richard Wagner, and besides, i am disgusted by his anti-semitism.

Among the moderns, there are also so many it would be hard to say. I'd list Sibelius and Rachmaninoff as my favorites, but could highly recommend many, many others. I would direct your attention in particular to the Bachiana Brasileiras by Heitor Villa-Lobos. He takes themes of Bach, and recasts them in a Brazilian musical metaphor--they're brilliant.

If you like Barber, youd like Garetski, and , of course,Orff and Mahler.
and Gershwin and Bernstein, (especially Candide).
Orff may make you a little creepy but listen to as much of his stuff as you can getn through before dropping him. He is an acquired taste.

Definately stay away from the Gymnapedie and anything by Sibelius(booooring).

I have a guilty pleasure of spooling through Cds by Richard STrauss and only playing the "Good stuff" Like in "Ein Heldenleben" there is about 4 minutes of that whole piece I like

My all time fav tone poem is Liszt's Les Preludes. (Its like how a smell evokes memories, I find that certain music evokes times of our past) So I recall listening to "Flash Gordon" on Saturday morining tv with my cousins and all the while I was being exposed to music that I later learned was not just written as a movie theme.

farmerman- It's right up there for me. If you can remember, although everyone knows that the1812 Overture was played during the Lone Ranger, many don't realize that snippets of Les Preludes were played during the show.

Another two of my favorites are Dvorak chamber pieces, especially the American String Quartet and the Dumky Piano Trio.

Heres Saties Gymnopedie no.1, better than valiumyaaaaawwwwwwwnnnnn

Among the music of Barber's approximate contemporaries, here are a handful of pieces that for one reason or another strike me as appealing to the same sensibility as Barber's Adagio for Strings (which, incidentally, is actually an orchestral arrangement of a piece he'd written earlier... the second movement of the Second String Quartet):

Mahler: Symphony No. 9
Berg: Altenberg Lieder
Sibelius: Symphony No. 6
Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Poulenc: Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Tympani
Britten: Serenade for Tenor, French Horn, and Strings
Reich: Different Trains
Saariaho: Du cristal

Thank you all!
Amongst the four of you, there seem to be a lot of viable options, so I am sure I will find something to my liking!

Phoenix, I was joking about the Amadeus Bach Handel of course.

Naj

Good to see those lists...

speaking of Lizst... I'd forgotten about Les Preludes, thanks for the mention.

[quote]Phoenix, I was joking about the Amadeus Bach Handel of course. [/quote]

najmelliw - Well you SAID that you knew little about music!

najmelliw - Well you SAID that you knew little about music!
[/b][/quote]

I did realize that, which in turn gives the reason why i added my not so subtle praise for one cartoon mouse in there as well... Oh, and this little fella of course => )

I give high praise to whoever got the luminous idea for using the adagio in Platoon... it meshes so perfectly with the entire tone and setting of that movie...

One quick addendum: if you're looking for works similar to Barber's Adagio for Strings, you could always listen to other works by Barber! He wrote a lovely Violin Concerto as well as a Cello Concerto. For a somewhat grittier but still completely accessible sound, you could also sample his two symphonies.

Anyway, happy hunting. Let us know what you find!