Ah, don’t get me started. I’m a big believer in piano music, symphonies and operas. Spotify is great for finding what you like. So here goes with my list.
Piano
- Mozart’s 21st and 24th Piano Concerti.
- Beethoven’s 3rd and 4th Piano Concerti.
- Chopin’s Nocturnes
- Debussy Piano stuff (much of his orchestral work was written for piano first, but sometimes vice versa)
As for Renaissance stuff, are you talking about your previously-mentioned Baroque era music?
Romantic Era
HUGE fan of the Russians. All of Tchaikovsky’s Ballets, not to mention his symphonies, are great. I also like Rimsky-Korsakov (Scheherazade-the tale of the 1001 nights). Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
I also like Dvorak a lot, not just his symphonies (7th, 8th, and 9th = New World), Slavonic Dances, but also his various suites, including the outstanding Violin Concerto / Romance (awesome).
Verdi & Wagner (see below)
Modern
I am also a big fan of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (which I take to be your “Order…O Fortuna”). The whole thing is great, not just the opener / closer (the O Fortuna chorus). Much of the stuff in between those bookends is outstanding…there’s spring awakening music, dance music, tavern music, music about romance, then a glorious finale.
Mahler
I’m a HUGE Mahler fan (I place him under “modern.”) His core work are a collection of songs, which later on make their appearance in his symphonies. Frequently he features solo singers in his symphonies, such as (my favorite of all time) the 4th symphony.
His 4th symphony is a musical description (world building?) of a wonderland, with a “child” (soprano) describing their idea of heaven, in the 4th and final movement. The other movements move the story up to that description. It’s all breathtakingly beautiful. (For an entry point, I might start with the restful (ruhevoll) third movement.)
Then there’s his 6th symphony. It’s taken me fully 20 years to appreciate it fully. It’s been my obsession for the last 5 years. It’s often called his “tragic” symphony, in that the hero “dies” at the end. The journey there is the closest thing to a thriller, as in a novel or action movie, I’ve ever heard in music. You’re on the edge of your seat, things are hurtling along, looks like we’re gonna make it … will we make it? If you ever want an idea of what I mean, just listen to the first 30 seconds of the last movement. Big, energetic crescendo at the start, fading into a spooky, hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling, and they’re just getting started. Mahler was a genius at orchestrating sound effects, as it were, and you get a full taste of it here. And the Andante Moderato of the 6th is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.
However, I keep coming home to his core songs and song cycles. They’re memorable, artistic, frequently ok with just a soloist and one piano, or maybe a (frequently small) orchestra. It’s the essence of Mahler. Just wonderful songs: Des Knaben Wunderhorn; Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen; Kindertotenlieder (yes). If you just spent a few months listening to these songs, your mind would be filled with new musical landscapes and magic pathways you could visit whenever you want.
Maybe his biggest work is his mighty 8th symphony, just two movements, with chorus singing throughout the first movement, and something very operatic happening in the second, with stage directions, soloists, chorus, children’s chorus, and at the end, during the shimmering, glowing finale, just when you though things couldn’t get more intense, we get a (very loud) pipe organ joining in the heavenly wall of sound.
Opera
Speaking of opera, do you like any of it? If you’re relatively new, then I’d recommend anything by Mozart as a nice place to start:
- Magic Flute (Die Zauberflote)
- Marriage of Figaro
- Don Giovanni
- Cosi fan tutte
Also big opera favorites that pretty much everyone likes:
- Carmen (by Bizet)
- Lakme (Delibes)
Verdi: Contemporary of Wagner (see below); extremely melodic, dramatic, but without being schmaltzy. Great stuff, I’m a big fan of La Traviata and Otello. See the movies by Zeferelli about these two operas, definitely worth seeing.
Puccini: Another fan favorite. My best friend’s mom is a lifelong fan of the opera La Boheme, which is pretty much La Traviata, but by Puccini, not Verdi.
On the heavier side:
Richard Wagner. Caution, if you start liking this music, you might get captured by / obsessed with the Ring Cycle. It’s kind of like the Lord of the Rings, but 16 hours of musical theater. Wagner’s music is probably the origin of most modern classical music, particularly applied to movies, in that he was great at orchestrating live action stuff. Wagner hugely influenced Mahler; Mahler heavily influenced the immigrant composers for golden-age Hollywood, and the rest is history.
There’s a definite sense of mirror reflection going on here: Wagner took an ancient world, Nordic myth involving heroes, dragons, magic swords and a ring of power, and created the standard for operas and movie music that followed. Then in 2001, Howard Shore orchestrated the LOTR movie (based on the original sword and sorcerer literature) using the most authentic Wagnerian music style yet used for a movie.
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