Reply #147: A few ideas then. [View All]

[tjwmason]

If you're interested in pushing slightly at the boundaries.

Olivier Messiaen - Turangalila Symphony. Messiaen spends about a third of the time as my favourite composer, I would pick a fight with anybody who didn't agree with me that he was the greatest 20th century composer (few things get me into fights - but music is one ;) ). If you want try a chamber work his Quator pour le Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) - this was actually written in a Nazi P.o.W. camp. Both works (like all of his music) are infused with a deep and distinctive spirituality.

Leos Janacek - Glagolitic Mass. Though the term Glagolitic merely refers to the language used (a form of Croatian) it's acutally a magnificently onomatopoeic word to describe the whole work.

Dimitri Shostakovich - 4th and 7th Symphonies. The 4th was the last major work which he wrote before being attacked by Stalin over his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk", he withdrew it in the middle of rehersals and quickly wrote the 5th (which is very widely admired) given the times the other option might well have been the Gulag. The 7th represents his rehabilitation, it was written during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and in particular the seige of Leningrad (he was right in the middle of it) - it became a major propaganda coup for the Soviets and was performed in the seiged city in the summer of 1942.

Benjamin Britten - War Requiem. Marries the usual Latin texts of the Requiem with some of Wilfred Owen's poetry from the First World War. Written to commemorate the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral.

Richard Wagner - Parsifal. My favourite of his operas and easy listening at a mere 4 hours or so...As usual an odd mixture of imageries. I know that Wagner wouldn't like the notion of just listening to his operas (as opposed to seeing them).

More 'risky' choices:

Arvo Paert - Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. A very different sound world, to an extent a case of love-it-or-hate-it, written for strings and bell - with Paert one can't really speak of a 'tune' he writes (he's still living - in Germany, though a native Estonian) music according to a principle of his own devising called tintinabulation.

Tomas Luis da Victoria - Officium Defunctorum. If you're interested in trying early music whilst many of the works are undoubtably great music, because they pre-date the tonal structure which we're given from birth many find them to an acquired taste. Written for the funeral of the Empress Maria in 1603 - one of the heights of the renaissance. The undoubted master of Iberian renaissance (some of us would say of all renaissance - pooh to Palestrina).