This may well be the most pointless thing I have ever posted on an internet forum, but when the name of the forum is “Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share”, well, why not?
I dislike Vivaldi. All his music sounds like he remixed the same weak, limp-wristed, stale melody 50 times. Well, except maybe his vocal stuff. They’re not so bad. But for the most part, he sucks. A lot. And the Four Seasons are abused way too much by advertisers. You should listen to Couperin instead.
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Any esteemed classical composers you don’t particularly like?
I like Vivaldi though I agree with the comment about he being overused in commercials. So is Pacelbel’s Canon.
This may be heresy but I’ve never really been a big fan of Mozart. I feel that in comparison to Bach, Beethoven and yes, Vivaldi, he comes across as a lightweight. His stuff is pretty and fun to listen to but it doesn’t have any staying power in my mind. It’s not quite classical elevator music but, for me, it’s close. I have many cds from Bach, Handel etc. but only one from Mozart. I rarely listen to it.
I find the trouble with Vivaldi isn’t that he’s a pansy - far from it - but that he gets played by pansies. It’s music with balls, but it too often gets castrated.
Haydn I’ve always found problematic. What some people seem to find witty or cheerful, I find contrived and cloying. Only in the really serious stuff (some masses, Seven Last Words) do I find it easy to get involved.
There’s quite a lot of Prokofiev that I struggle with, for similar reasons. The Classical Symphony makes my skin crawl, whereas the fifth and sixth are corkers.
Okay, I’ll bite: I have no clue what you are talking about. Mock my lack of cognoscenti-ness.
My $.02: I find Haydn mannered and cute. I find it difficult to separate Wagner from his anti-Semitism - his sense of triumphalism demands something to vanquish and it is hard to forget what choices might have inspired this feeling in him. I can’t hear his music without considering its context and find it disgusting at some level. I acknowledge the Overly-Sensitive Jewish Guy aspect to my feelings - but he pisses me off.
…oh, and on a completely different non-musical note: Renoir sucks. His emotional investment is that of a Hallmark card. He was a rich-guy portraitist a la’ LeRoy Neiman who got lucky due to his associations.
If this warrants a whole 'nother thread, count me in…
Wagner’s antisemitism really is something of a myth, perpetuated by his place in Hitler’s view of art. He was no more prejudiced than the man-in-the-street of his time.
Vivaldi’s thing is that (IIRC) he wrote for performance and for his students – in other words, that a lot of the pieces we hear today were just exercises that he wrote for his violinists.
He is, however, a lot of fun! He’s one of my favorite composers to play, because he’s so vital and verve-y.
I do like the anecdote that, as he was scrawling out an umpteenth concerto for two violins and orchestra, he got to the cello part, wrote out about four lines, and rather than completing it left the note, “The rest is for the idiots.”
I do prefer Vivaldi’s operas and cantatas to his instrumental music, but for a composer with real balls and endless genius there’s only one place to turn.
“Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived.
I would bare my head and kneel at his grave”
– Ludwig van Beethoven (1824)
I’m not a huge fan of Mozart, but then my tastes run a little earlier. Having picked up my guitar again I’m relearning some Bach lute music that I used to be able to play.
If Vivaldi is played in the right hands, he rocks. His music is so immensely passionate that unless a performer is putting absolutely everything into it, it’s going to kind of suck. A good bout of Vivaldi should leave the musician(s) exhausted.
Beethoven, I like without exception. Bach and Handel and Mozart are all pretty good to.
I’m too much of an “I just want an excuse to play my violin” person to really be picky.
I doubt this affects Vivaldi more than any other composer, but there are a number of recordings out there that don’t come close to doing his music justice.
One that does is a 1972 DGG recording of his lute and mandolin concertos (Orchestre de Chambre, Takashi and Silvia Ochi, mandolins and Narciso Yepes, guitar (lute)). Absolutely fantastic.
For my money, Vivaldi is way underrated as a Baroque composer and in terms of total body of work is right up there with Bach and Handel, especially since he apparently didn’t waste as much time as those two did, writing tiresome, sissified Jesus-inspired vocal excesses.
As a mild hijack, I would like to propose that all classical CDs carry warning labels in two instances:
First, if you are a conductor who wants to stand out from the mob by playing a piece of music waaaay slower than anyone else, your recording should feature a label: (“WARNING - this plodding version may induce drowsiness, and should not be listened to while operating heavy machinery”).
Also, if you’re going to release an album where musicians play on period instruments or in ensembles “faithful to the period”, TELL ME BEFORE I BUY THE DAMN THING. It is annoying to hear stuff played on off-kilter instruments like a pianoforte that apparently was stored in Telemann’s sister-in-law’s attic for 200 years and never quite restored right, and I don’t care how authentic it supposedly is.
Hmmm, different strokes…I used to have Scarlatti down as one of the great pansies of the composing world, until I saw one particular recital, on a pianoforte that had been restored right, and my God does that music have balls. Still can’t stand it on a modern piano, though.
Haydn could crank out the pretty stuff. I see him as a member of the Tin Pan Alley of Classical, but it’s a credit to him that he could crank out so damned much (how many symphonies did he write?) of uniformly pretty and unmemorable stuff. Vivaldi is overplayed; his student stuff, though, I rank with that of Beethoven and Mozart–you have to be a hell of a composer to write “simple” stuff that is that good and you’d have to be a hell of a student to play it well.
