Which work is the best (for you)

For me, it is the Mozart clarinet concerto. As I like to say, "There's the Mozart clarinet concerto, and then ... there's everything else."

There are several lifetimes of listening to be had across the full spectrum but for me, its the Mozart.

WCPE just played the famous slow movement. I did not catch the performer's name, but I thought it a bit muddy fingering in swifter passages. The reed seemed a bit too dry in others. They cracked a few of the higher notes.

But the pianissimo was a mere faint whisper. So soft, I had to bend my ear closer to the radio to hear it. And it was the Mozart, so even if they just SPAT it out, I would have teared up.

Top THAT!

Personally, I rank the Clarinet Quintet its equal.

I'm also rather fond of Finzi's concerto.

I'll have to be sure to give those a listen, I am not familiar with them!

Long ago I had a complete LP set of all Mozart violin sonatas, which I treasured and spent many a long night with them playing on an ancient stereo. I can't remember what happened to them ... I think they were from Deusche Gramafone (sp?) and I bought them in around 1972 or thereabouts. I remember the case had a profile of Mozart embossed on the gold cover.

Countless (and to me, priceless) other LPs lost over time ... what was the old "record of the month" club for classical afficianados? the *something? society or some such. Was it the Classical Music Society?? Went belly up some 10 or more years ago. Sadly, I lost all of those. They were all stolen from my house about 25 years ago. They did not take my oboe though LoL. Must be a joke in there somewhere.

Robber1: Hey man what is THIS thing??
Robber2: DUDE that is an OBOE man, it is used to inflict horrible pain on your earbones.

PUT IT DOWN BEFORE IT HURTS US.

I am now an old man, at least this internet thing brings me many fond classical memories.

>3 clammer:

Are you thinking of the Musical Heritage Society, perhaps? (Wikipedia)

I still have some of their albums. They were great in one's impecunious youth!

Yes, it was indeed the Musical Heritage Society!! I recall one of the last albums I received from them was around Christmas time of ... 1993 or so, and it was a favorite of mine because it was not the USUAL Noels of "Hark the Herald" and such, but Christmas tunes of the baroque era honked forth on period instruments with much hautboies (sp?) and out of tune valve-less horns. Good times.

Thanks for the link!

The Mozart Clarinet Concerto is certainly among my top ten favourite pieces of music. However, I would have to point in a very different direction. One of my faourites is Handel's oratorio Atalanta. I also have to give high marks to Vivaldi's Gloria and Haydn's Saint Cecilia Mass.

Schubert’s Fifth Symphony. I saw a performance a few years ago by the quaintly named B’Rock Orchestra, conducted by René Jacobs, which was an absolute delight.

>7 haydninvienna: The amazing final movement is grueling on the violin section.

Hmm. J.S. Bach's Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052, or his utterly sublime Violin Concerto in A minor, BWV 1041

Fond memories of the Musical Heritage Society here too. Their catalogues were marvelous reading.

Anything by Bach. Especially the last movement, "Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder", of the St Matthew Passion. This is the single most desolate piece of music I know — Our Lord is in the grave, evil has triumphed, and all is lost. Thus nicely settling us up for the jubilant beginning of the Easter Oratorio.

Alternatively, for desolation, how about the last number, "Der Leiermann", of Schubert's cycle Winterreise? The image of the crazy old man eternally cranking his hurdy-gurdy in a frozen square of Vienna ... I attended a performance of this cycle once in Longyearbyen, the town on Svalbard, in February, as part of an Arctic Chamber Music Festival. Hearing the song sung by an excellent Norwegian baritone whose name I have forgotten, and then walking out into the snowy street outside, was literally one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Another memorable performance was Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake, in the Angelika-Kauffmann-Saal, a beautiful little hall in the village of Schwartzenberg in the west of Austria. The landscape there is pure magic, beyond-words beautiful.

Fav: Beethoven's 14th piano sonata
Close 2nds: Franz Schubert Opus 52 and Handel's Messiah

>10 haydninvienna: Well, yes, but I try not to let my partiality show too much. And coincidentally I have had that chorus stuck in my head for the last four days. Desolate yes--the pain is so palpable--but so beautiful.

The best Matthew Passion I have heard was by the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston several years ago. Joshua Ellicott as the Evangelist simply ripped one's heart out. And the The Bach Project's Matthew is good, though I haven't listened to all of it yet.

For a while I went to a St Matthew Passion every Easter but the pandemic finished that. Most memorable of all: in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Bach’s own church. Also the least comfortable. Most memorable Evangelist: Mark Padmore. Padmore has considerable stage presence as well as a beautiful high tenor voice. I heard him sing Winterreise once, and the memory of him at the end, standing on a darkened stage staring into nothing, haunts me still.

>10 haydninvienna:

From time to time I like to play through the chorales from the Matthew Passion in order to experience how the harmonizations become progressively more complex, more chromatic, and more dissonant until that last one ending with chord that remains unresolved from Friday until Easter Sunday. The effect is particularly juicy on an instrument tuned in an unequal temperament.

>14 librorumamans: I’m not musically educated, I just know what I like, but your comment doesn’t surprise me at all. One thing I’ve learned about Bach is that there’s always more to it: it isn’t just pretty tunes or even heartbreaking agony, there’s structure, and then structure within the structure. There is always the feeling that Bach is playing a deeper game than you think—or at least that I think.

>15 haydninvienna:

There is a facet of Bach studies that explores the idea that Bach expressed in his music, including his instrumental music, the results of deep philosophical thinking. For example:
Mellers: Bach and the dance of God
Yearsley: Bach and the meanings of counterpoint
Dreyfus: Bach and the patterns of invention

John Butt, in The Cambridge companion to Bach writes:

What I suggest ... is that Bach's attitude to music, his way of musical thinking, closely paralleled the way in which Spinoza and Leibniz saw the world and its constitutive substance cohere. Indeed, his oeuvre might be viewed as the articulation of a metaphysical theory, not only of music, but also of matter in general.

This without any suggestion that Bach read or was even aware of Spinoza.

I sense this in the keyboard works, particularly the six partitas and the Goldbergs. These are serious workings out of a world view.