Classical Music
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Another in a glut of articles which have been appearing recently, as perhaps the importance of music education, training and (crucially) participation is finally beginning to be recognised more widely.
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Have been meaning to get St. Matthew's Passion for ages - picked this new release up this week.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bach-Matthew-Passion-Johann-Sebastian/dp/B00E8KC5HY
With a surround sound system it is supposed to recreate the dual choir and organ/harpsichord set up for the recording but it sounds gorgeous on my stereo hifi.
Still have the Gardiner recording on my Amazon wish list though.Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
That also looks like a pretty fine recording though I'm not personally acquainted with it at this time. If I ever have any money, I quite like the idea of having a decent HiFi system. At the moment I do the vast majority of my listening on my iPhone, which is considerably less than ideal.
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You don't have to spend huge amounts to get something rather nice - especially nowadays. The sky is the limit but its all about diminishing returns once you hit a certain quality - and the listening experience will depend on where you sit in the room too. Being a musician you might be cursed with having a good ear which will discern a difference with higher price equipment but hifi stockists will let you audition equipment in-shop to see if you can - good ones have listening rooms.
If you look at NAD equipment which is British designed and assembled off shore to keep costs down you will be able to put an integrated amplifier and CD player together for little more than a next gen console at early adaptor pricing and a few games. Decent speakers may put you a bit over that but it will last you ages - I am still using my NAD equipment and Mission speakers after nearly 20 years - and this recording sounds great on it. Hifi buffs will scoff - but it is well worth going into a Richer Sounds shop and see if they will give you a demo and they usually have a deal going on something.
I'm no hifi snob - I have a BOSE speaker for my iPod and music sounds pretty swell to me too - which at £250 should do - as you can get a pretty good amp for that. The iPod and bud style earphones sounds pretty good to me too. Using iTunes settings to rip CDs at slightly higher bitrate settings than mpeg will help the sound quality.Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
I'm no hifi snob either as I have little knowledge or experience of top-end systems but I can hear very well the distinction in quality between a lot of lower-end stuff. Even with my CDs ripped at the highest rate possible for iTunes, they're still sounding pretty awful through the standard iPhone earbud things.
Your advice seems pretty sound though thanks. Only problem is that I don't have the money for any kind of hifi setup beyond the most rudimentary, cheap and fairly nasty basic stuff.
Even avoiding the marked-up prices of major brands who do decent quality stuff and paying less for the same quality elsewhere, I still think I'd be looking at spending at least £3k on something worthwhile, that could last me for decades to come. Obviously, when I'm talking about top-end stuff you can probably add on a zero or three to that figure...
Having examined various speakers over the years it seems I'd have to be spending around £1k just for those alone, to get something of acceptable quality, along with high-quality cabling which doesn't come cheap either. -
Youngsters are ignorant of classical music because of 'elitist' attitude
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies says centuries of great works could be lost to future generations more interested in “vacuous celebrity culture and inane talent shows" -
What's good for Christmas?
Would be nice to be able to take a break from Slade..Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
yeah.Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
OK, I created a spotify playlist with some of the classic Christmas classics:
Christmas 2013
Including:
Carols from Kings - the annual Carol service from King's College, Cambridge, broadcast on the BBC
Handel's Messiah
Bach - Christmas Oratorio
Britten - A Ceremony of Carols
Tchaikovsky - Nutcracker Suite (this is a stunning recording - try 'Waltz of the Flowers' for starters)
Vivaldi - Winter (from the Four Seasons)
Prokofiev - Troika (from Lieutenant Kijé)
I put whole works in because there's just too many good bits just to put selected highlights.
Feel free to browse at will! -
toppo....cheers.
Waltz of the flowers IS wonderful.. funnily enough the 1st thing that comes to mind on listening to it is Parodius (I know it shouldn't but it does) as it has some wonderful versions of classical tunes peppered through the levels.
Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
Now That's What I Call Relaxing Classical Music or Why Classic FM has a lot to answer for
Also, linked at the end of that article is an amusingly catty (but quite fair) dissection of Katherine Jenkins -
Absolutely beautiful piano music -
"The Piano Ship" is very Satie-esque. I think the LP is supposed to be released in December, I'm definitely getting it. -
It makes for good atmospheric background music to a film perhaps. Pretty, if a little unengaging though. At least it's not Einfuckingaudi.
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That's a very long way of saying "because it's just opera" there. -
Kind of a variant on the theory of coffee flavoured sweets in Revels and Roses (at least there used to be one in Roses before it morphed into a so-called selection of different sweets that are in fact more or less all the same - Quality Street and Milk Tray has suffered the same fate somehow over the last few years - I put it down to corporate greed and corner cutting).
There has to be something not so nice to make the enjoyable bits even more enjoyable.
Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
I think there are some interesting points to be made aside from the obvious though.
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I like coffee choccies.
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I like them too - but we would be in the minority.
Holding the wrong end of the stick since 2009. -
Most of my knowledge (such that it is) of Classical music, comes from the music used for audio story tapes that I listened to as a kid. For example, the intro to Five got to Smuggler's Top was Beethoven's 5th, The Snow Queen used Vivaldi's "L'inverno" (Winter) I, and The Secret Garden featured In the Steppes of Central Asia by Borodin.
The one that drives me insane is the music used for a Robin Hood tape I had when I was around nine or ten. There's not much point even typing this, as I forgot the tune a few years ago, so unless I find the actual tape I'll be flummoxed forever. There are probably three reasons it stuck in my head - firstly because I liked it, secondly because it was the only one my dad couldn't identify, and thirdly because Robin Hood seemingly popped his clogs towards the end of the tape and I was never sure if we were missing additional releases. Perhaps It'll come back to me someday and whistle it on my deathbed. -
Looking on Naxos audiobooks reveals a version of Robin Hood read by Benedict Flynn which has a classical soundtrack though doesn't specify what. You can listen to the opening though so should tell you if it's the one you know. If so, I can probably identify the music for you.
I used to have something slightly different, as a kid. Audio tapes of famous (usually programmatic) works of classical music with narration which told the story of the work. Scheherazade and Love of the three oranges were favourites. -
Thanks, but it's not that one unfortunately.
iirc it didn't actually have Robin Hood in the title - possibly The Hooded Man or something similar, but that sounds more like one of my dad's TDK60s than mine. It definitely wasn't Clannad anyway. -
It is sublimely cleansing, like much great music of the baroque period. Plus, I love playing those Concerti Grossi as they have really satisfying continuo parts.
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