What Music are you looking for or listening to this week? (13/08/2023)

G'day Guys and Gals,

Time for another one after a two week break.

The general outline is below (Copied from r/rock and slightly modified)

1. Post whatever you've been listening to lately, whether its a piece you've been listening to a lot, or a new piece you've discovered, it doesn't matter, post it.
2. This is where you can post all requests and recommendations.
3. If you're looking for a recommendation give a description/music link/composer so that other people will know what you want.
4. Example: "I want to hear an composer that sounds like Tchaikovsky" (you can get more specific but this is usually enough) - and then hopefully someone will respond with recommendations X, Y, and Z.
5. You can also leave a top level comment recommending an composer/school that you think others might like if they like X, Y, and Z.
6. The more descriptive you guys are, the easier it is to help you find what you want. Just stating a composer's name isn't that helpful since you might only like one specific aspect of that composer's music.

As usual I'll start.

Listened to a fair bit of Schubert's vocal works, including;

and

I also dived deeper into Berlioz, finding pieces like:

I also revived my love for Mendelssohn:

Hey Arjuna,

This week I'm still listening Bach's Orgsn works. I really think that Bach displays some even more amazing counterpoint, affect and timbre in his organ works more than some of his other keyboard works, since he's a virtuosic organist.

This one really has some of Bach's best counterpoint. It's effect is monumentous.

These two remind me the Passions and Mass in B minor with how tragic they are.

The subject of the fugue just get into my mind...

Henry

Still a newbie on this site but thought I'd share as well 🙂

I'm still not yet out of my Scriabin 'phase' (if you can call it that), where after a long period of listening to sections all over his compositional repertoire, I've recently started sorting through all of his opus numbers in order. As of now, the Op. 37 Preludes have graciously infected me over the past few days. I think they encapsulate what makes middle-period Scriabin so intoxicating; a moody temperament, harmonies that remind me of slightly-burnt sugar, and, occasionally, some lovely lyricism.

A bit of the Belgian vocalist Jacques Brel has popped back into my schedule for sanity's sake. As an ongoing student of French at school, I fell into a bit of a old-school French chanson rabbit-hole a while ago and only just evicted the last of these bangers...or so I thought. Nothing comes close to the theatricality of this.

And after an extended period of time having only known Zhu Jian-er for his orchestral masterpieces, I went back for a couple of solo piano works. These two preludes (Op. 4) date back to 1955 and are some of his oldest, and though they evoke a somewhat more fluid and reserved sound than what I expected, numerous idiosyncratic features still stand out to me: beautiful melody and phrase writing, carefully-applied impressionistic harmonies and masterful mood-setting. Even parts of these piano works sound like they were conceived with an orchestra in mind, looking at bars 21-29 in Prelude No. 1.

Britney Spears

https://youtu.be/niF12MU7I1o

https://youtu.be/hVqrW-fPOQ0

@Luis HernándezI had to sing this in my choir classes in the music school when I was 11yo, despite this piece being beautiful it was a pain to sing 😋

5 minutes ago, Samuel_vangogh said:

@Luis HernándezI had to sing this in my choir classes in the music school when I was 11yo, despite this piece being beautiful it wad a pain in the donkey to sing 😋

 

OMG, Whitacre seems easy when you listen to his music, but all those dissonances... And there is no excess in this piece.

My recent listens have been pretty diverse: I've listened to plenty of Ravel over the past year or so, and he remains the one composer whose entire output (chamber music, solo piano, symphonic works) I still find absolutely enjoyable after so long. Of them, his Alborada del Gracioso and Piano Concerto in G remain my all-time favourites.

Other than him, my listens have been sporadic, and depend more on an individual piece's merit than a given style. In particular, I've been trying to listen to lots of Romantic-era symphonies to get accustomed to the expectations one might have when listening to a symphony : I've listened to Brahms' 1st and Nielsen's 4th, Mahler's 5th, lots of Beethoven, and some symphonies from Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich. 

And an honourable mention: Mendelssohn's Sextet in D major, op. 110. Just delightful to listen to, and my mum's favourite: she plays it in the car a lot.