Favorite Classical Music/ Smaller Pieces

La Danse Macabre, Saint-Saens
Karelia, Sibelius
The Swan of Tuonela, Sibelius
Anything recorded by Andrés Segovia

but best of all

Maurerische Trauermusik (Masonic Funeral Music), Mozart

Allegro non Molto, Winter (from the 4 clichés), Vivaldi
Slavic March (Russo-Serbian march), Tchaikovsky
A few minute long segments from Beethoven's 9th
Partida #3 in E for solo violin, Bach
Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin (maybe not classical but classic nonetheless
Bits and pieces of the 40th, Mozart
Trischt trascht polka opus 214, Strauss
Polka Pizzicatto, Strauss
The Storm op 1812, Tchaikovsky
Storm at Sea Allegro, Vivaldi

Gotta stop typing, the music (Rhapsody in Blue) is at the pacing part.

I'm a great fan of Telemann's programmatic music. My absolute favourite (tonight at least) is found here (click click). You can really hear those frogs croaking when the orchestra is groovin'

I also look forward to opportunities to listen to works by Buxtehude.

partly because ... and from ... http://www.dacapo-records.dk/?page=artist&id=1397&k=1

I'm going to a performance of Schütz's Christmas Story in about 3 weeks. I'm really looking forward to that. Perhaps something to add to the list of loved music.

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does anyone know the name of the following piece and the name of the person who composed it.

go to http://www.geocities.com/Paris/3486/otherfi.html
and it starts playing.

thanks in advance

halloeh- Welcome to A2K. I have RealPlayer, but when I click on the link, the slide moves, but no sound comes out!

hi Phoenix32890,

you need to download the quicktime player
you can find it here
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

That's strange. I thought that I had the Quick Time Player Installed. Maybe I assigned Quick Time files to Real Player? I'll have to check when I have the time!

Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major - adagio.

It is exquisite.

Mozart was an all around musical genius, but I think his writing for woodwinds, and that includes how he used woodwinds in his other compositions (the interplay between the woodwinds and plucked strings in the first movement of his Sinfonia Concertante comes to mind), stands above all his other works.

Haydn's String Quartet, Op.64 no.5, first movement
Beethoven's Violin and Piano Sonata, No. 6, Op. 30, No. 1, second movement
Mozart's Contradances
Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli, Gloria
Debussy's Violin and Piano Sonata, first movement

(It's strange to me that the thread is about non-symphonic works and half the stuff that's been named have still been symphonic, but I guess you mean "non-symphonies.")

In the symphonic non-symphonies category, here are some of my favorites:
Poulenc: Organ Concerto
Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste
Ravel: Mother Goose Suite
Stravinsky: Petrushka
Britten: Serenade for Tenor, French Horn, and Strings
Debussy: La Mer

In the non-symphonic non-symphonies category, some more favorites:
Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin
Ligeti: Piano Etudes (especially Book 2)
Poulenc: Sextet
Bach: Art of Fugue
Stravinsky: Agon
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 30 in E
Debussy: Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp
Boulez: Le Marteau sans Maître



p.s. I didn't mean for this post to be a response only to Infrablue's post. I hit the wrong "reply" button. Still learning my way around the new layout!

Good Lord, I also didn't realize until just now how old this thread was. I clicked on the "music" tag on the side and this was among the first things that came up, so I assumed it was a recent discussion. Not that there's anything wrong with resurrecting an old thread.

Shapeless- And what is funny, is that I am still scouting out small concert music gems. In the last few years, I have learned to use the term "concert music".

Classical music is a term which indicates a style of music that came after the Baroque, and before the Romantic era. Mozart and Haydn were the most famous composers of "classical" music.

I have mentioned this before, but if you love concert music, you might want to check out The Teaching Company's music courses by Robert Greenberg.

http://www.teach12.com/teach12.aspx?ai=16281

I had bought a couple of their courses, when I discovered that my public library had a lot of Greenberg's lectures on CD. Over the last few months, I have been literally devouring them, as fast as I can get my hot little hands on them.

You're right to put the quotes around the word "classical," since music historians have still not quite figured out what to do about this problematic term. There are so many disadvantages to using it. For one thing, it's not a term that was ever used by the composers it purports to describe. It was retroactively given to them by German Romantic composers seeking to write (or mythologize) their own musical history: just as ancient Greek culture was seen as the seed the flowered into modern Western civilization, so too was the music of Mozart and Haydn seen as the seed that flowered into the music of the mid-nineteenth century. That is why Mozart and Haydn were given the same descriptor as Greek Antiquity: "Classical." That is also why the word applies more or less exclusively to Germanic composers. (These days you sometimes hear Boccherini described as "Classical," but only because he was a contemporary of Mozart and Haydn. The Romantics who invented the term certainly did not include Boccherini when they were drawing their musical family tree.)

And so there's a bit of controversy about why we hold on to a term whose primary purpose was to validate the careers of composers born a half-century after Mozart and Haydn. It's also not clear why we need a term at all to designate such a small period of time (the "Classical period" is usually thought to run between 1750 and 1800), let alone just three composers (if you throw in Beethoven) out of that small period of time.

But all of these disadvantages just don't trump the one advantage the term has: the fact that everyone has been using it for a century and a half. Scholars have tried switching to the phrase "late 18th-century music," but "the Classical period" is just too convenient.



Thanks for the lead on the Greenberg lectures, by the way. I routinely teach music appreciation and am gearing up to do it again this fall, so I'll check out the lectures to see if they might be useful resources for my students.

Weird how the latest version of A2K resurrects threads.

Right now Handel's Largo Concerto Grosso Op.6 has just popped on. Nice.

Debussy's Arabesque No 1 which I'm trying to master on the piano...but

Tomita has a great version...thought you'd like it Hinge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmSH7BsNSrM

Mmmm.... Debussy piano music. Some of my favorites:

Bruyères

Reflets dans l'eau (every so often I take a stab at this piece--an endeavor that invariably ends with me being humbled)

Ballade

Toccata from the Suite pour le piano (probably my favorite piano toccata after the Prokofieff one I posted on JPB's thread)

Prelude no 2...lovely.

There's something about Faure and Debussy and the other French composers that I love

Faure's Pavane

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpgyTl8yqbw