What are your favorite classical music moments?

[alex matson]

I ask, not to regale you with my choices, necessarily, but to get turned on to something new. But hopefully some will enjoy mine.
I've heard a lot more than I remember. but a few stand out - the kind of music that one likes the first time they hear it, and even more later.

My first pick is the Great Gate of Kiev from Pictures At An Exhibition. I like the whole piece, but the sheer beauty of the last movement just blows me away. This is a pretty good rendition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-JjNJAkBZc
though parts of it are too fast for me. The first recording I ever heard of this was Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony - every other one I've heard, it seems like they're rushing things. I just found an unplayed vinyl copy of this, which I'm saving for my next good turntable (same goes for A Wizard, a True Star!)

Next would have to be:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LXl4y6D-QI
It's the kind of piece of music that seems to have come from another dimension. It's like watching one's lover sleep to me.

Years ago, I walked into a record store, and Gorecki's Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKk-w_0SpSw
was on. It just hit me like a ton of bricks, but nothing could prepare me for the experience of seeing a PBS special about the man, complete with the entire symphony played over images of the Holocaust. I think it's the saddest fucking emotion I've ever felt in my life. Gorecki says the piece is not specifically about that, however. The music is used to great effect in the film 'Fearless' as an airliner crashes. To this day, that scene and the one where Steve Martin leaves John Candy on the subway platform are the only two film moments that make me tear up every time.
Found it...good old Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkO4zp83Ig4

Continuing with the music-in-films theme...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHDY6mcWjM&NR=1
The whole thing is marvelous, of course, but the ascending notes with countermelody around the two minute mark, much like Clair de Lune, is the kind of musical moment that fascinates me, where little notes played very fast become more of a color than a chord.

Another little tune that i discovered from the Shine soundtrack was Schumann's Almost Too Serious. I've tried to play it, but I'm not classically trained. Maybe you can get a sense of what your left hand has to do in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_xH5hP8_Ko
It's like playing reggae for the first time, where your rhythmic assumptions are turned around.

I like a lot of different stuff, from Beethoven to Varese, but this kind of period music seems to give me the strongest responses. I have to say, compared to this stuff, with its altered chords and chromaticism, Vivaldi and Mozart sounds about as groundbreaking as Joy To The World. I find dissonance beautiful.

If you're still with me...ever heard Night Meets Light by The Dixie Dregs?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDfdKEyoJaM

[lukievan]

great post - loved that first link and will check out the others. thanks.

[LeedyGuy]

YES. I'm a big Ligeti fan and an even bigger fan of Edgar Varese. Ameriques blows my mind every time.

Keep this topic rolling!

[cgarges]

The Philly Ormandy period. Pretty unstoppable.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[austingreen]

There's a point in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring where he sustains a chord with all twelve tones in the chromatic scale, spread out on various instruments, across multiple octaves.

The part goes: dwwwaaa dwwaaaaammmm bwwwwAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHH!!!

That last one is the chord I'm taking about, I can't say from memory which part it's in but once you've heard it, you wait for it every time.

[;ivlunsdystf]

The first organ chord in Mahler's 8th. As seen in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wi1j-rpcEw

I wandered into a room at the doctor's office once and heard that Gorecki 3 playing on a tiny clock radio speaker. I already knew it well; it was pretty nice to be hit with it in such a strange location and feel the power of it. Great stuff.

In Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, right before the final scenes where fitz gets his opera performance, there are two french horn players riding in a dugout canoe playing a little parallel 3rds motif from the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5, as if to warm up. Again it's nice to be hit with something like that from way out of context.

Prokofiev violin concerto no. 2, 3rd movement. As heard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe-MjPf ... re=related

The Shostakovich 24 preludes/fugues (I prefer the Ashkenazy version) pretty much contain the entire universe. So to speak.

[vvv]

Not a classical fan, really, but "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now - yeah!

[LazarusLong]

Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber

or, though it's modern,

Knee 5 from Philip Glass's Einstein on The Beach is one of the few pieces of music that can bring me to tears no matter what. Compelling and moving - the voice actor is astounding and though he's speaking, his voice interlays beautifully with the violin and organs/synths.

[lukievan]

I'm reading 'The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century' by Alex Ross. I'm only 40 or so pages into it but it's already whetted my appetite for more instrumental/orchestral/experimental music. He has an online audio guide with excerpts of some key pieces from the modern classical repertoire.
Check it out here: http://www.therestisnoise.com/audio/

[;ivlunsdystf]

Hey, looky! The Alex Ross website you linked to has a still from Fitzcarraldo!

[thunderboy]

I find it difficult to reduce my experience with "legitimate" music to a few moments, but one that always give me goosebumps:

Stichira, from Penderecki's Utrenya - Begins with aleatoric shouts delivered by a double choir into a cacophony of tubular bells and klaxon-esque glissandos in the strings. Like a lot of Penderecki's work, there is a very real emotional response, usually panic or fear. So powerful.

jt

[alex matson]

That Alex Ross site is great. Thanks!

I'd like to make a note of something that I always seem drawn to - altered chords.
The same things I like about Chopin and Ravel are the things I like best about Elliott Smith, Radiohead and Built To Spill.

The way I hear a lot of music, you get your tonality established early on, and then you can either be pleasantly surprised by the way the composer gets out of the standard chord choices, or bored by the fact that they don't.

Of course, there are great songs that don't vary from the key signature, but, as a friend and bandmate observed once about some horrible request we had to learn for a gig, "You don't listen to this and think, 'Wow, how'd they think of that?' "

But whether it's Smith (Waltz #1, Tomorrowx2) BTS (I Would Hurt A Fly, Made Up Dreams), or Radiohead (take your pick, but the first one I ever noticed was Paranoid Android) there's always something in there that bumps my internal VU meter up a notch.

Here's a simple example: Chopin's Prelude in E-Minor (op.28 no. 4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef-4Bv5Ng0w
The second chord is suspended briefly, and that makes all the difference to me. Then a different element of the chords is changed until, with my limited knowledge of theory anyway, it's impossible to say what's going on other than Chopin must have just experimented a lot.

This reminds me of Lennon's 'Because.' What can I say...I love that stuff. I don't care if it was a Beethoven piece played backwards.

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate Hank Williams as well..variety is everything. But most of the writers I've played with couldn't even conceive of finding chord progressions like this. I've tried myself, but it sounds too derivative. The most original harmonic thing I've come up with was the result of experimenting with with playing two triads at once and then moving it around. It was unique all right...but not exactly comfort food.