Maybe it’s just that I’m strange, but I find Mozart to be extremely over rated. I don’t actually HATE him, but he just does absolutely nothing for me.
Ditto most baroque classical, even though that’s supposed to be the “golden age” of orchestral works, I guess. I like some pieces, but eh, I can take it or leave it.
I adore Bartok’s music! The String Quartets, the Piano Concertos, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the Violin Concerto, The Piano Sonata, many solo piano pieces, all of it.
How can someone not like Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra?
Knorf
The only piece of classical music I cannot abide is the Blue Danube. It’s like an early version of “It’s a Small World After All.”
dah-dah-dah-dah-dah (da-DA! da-DA!)
There are few composers I truly, actively dislike, but there are some:
Offenbach
Suppe
Franck
Howard Hanson (that shite makes me wanna vomit!)
Francaix
Orff
But why be so negative? There’s so much great music out there, it’s easy to leave the stuff you don’t like alone.
People who claim to love Classical music sometimes bash 20th century music, but it was 20th century music that hooked me on classical music (Stravinsky and Bartok in particular). My adoration of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Varese, and much music post-1950 came later, but certainly 20th century music was a big “hook” for me. I think many people share this.
Knorf
Interlochen alum, are we?
As a music performance major I try to appreciate all music but the very very early stuff such as Gregorian chant (sorry to be a little off topic) is a little harder to appreciate then most… I can handle music that is not consonant though, as long as a piece of music resolves at the end. Sometimes its funny when it doesn’t but when you give 30 minutes of your time to a piece then it just ends abruptly I can get slightly annoyed…
Did you hear about the viola player who filled in for the maestro for a week and conducted the orchestra? When he returned to his section the next week, his stand partner said, “Where have you been?”
Wait, what am I saying? Of course you’ve heard that one.
Knorf, I agree with you on Hanson, BTW.
must… resist… urge… to post… viola-player-jokes…
even the one about why its viola players are like lightning…
I have a deep dislike for true “classical” music, since it seems so terribly boring; Bach, Verdi, Mozart, Handel–they all get way too much play on popular, “easy-listening” classical stations. Romanticism and forward is where the interesting music lies, with exceptions for gross atonal overload and Erik Satie (gag).
One thing I just remembered when I switched on the radio today. I hate (and HATE is the word) orchestral adaptations of pieces originally written for solo instrument or lead instrument. Like Hungarian Rhapsody without the piano or Bach’s fugas for a symphony orchestra. I mean, good grief! What a dreadfulmisconception.
[one execption might be Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition adapted by Ravel. That works. But most of the others are poop]
Speaking of jokes…
…if it ain’t Baroque…
If you think Gregorian chant is boring and monotonous, then you haven’t been listening to the right chants. The slow, rhythmless style of chant is actually a 20th-century innovation, based on certain French musicologists’ theories on what the chant “should” sound like (the so-called “Solesmes” approach). This is the style of chant that was popularized by the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos.
There are several groups today that perform Gregorian and related chants according to different theories, and they all sound (in my opinion) infinitely better. Ensemble Organum specializes in non-Gregorian Western chants such as Old Roman and Ambrosian, and they perform them with a very Eastern sound. Ensemble Gilles Binchois does Gregorian chant according to the pre-Solesmes method, with the music having a much steadier rhythm. Schola Hungarica I especially recommend; they are a Hungarian group that does all sorts of Western chant with a mixed men’s and boys’ choir, and they are absolutely incredible. The music is exceedingly complex, ranging from slowly winding melodies to blindingly fast melismata, and is completely monophonic. Only one voice, but very interesting rhythm and melody.
yBeayf, still, how can anyone truely be sure exactly how ancient chants, tropes and sequences sounded back in the middle ages? The stuff that we find with unstaffed neumes and such is usually “translated” into the properly staffed stuff which we are used to today. But, I am still interested into this other type of chant you speak up. I learned about Ambrosian, Gallican and Mozarabic chants earlier in school, but all the stuff we listened to was the Gregorian stuff put into place by Charlemagne. Does this Schola Hungarica group have anything out on CD? (I’m Hungarian myself, perhaps I will be enlightened 
).
We can’t truly know how the music sounded back then, but there are some good guesses, and it’s become pretty well-agreed that Solesmes is not how it sounded. Various groups take different approaches. It is fairly obvious that before the Carolingian reforms of the older chant traditions, Western chant sounded quite similar to present-day Byzantine chant. Marcel Peres, who heads the Ensemble Organum, has even argued for the presence of the ison or drone in Old Roman and related chants.
All three groups I mentioned have released huge numbers of recordings, all of which are very good. Ensemble Organum has released three albums of Old Roman chant, one of Ambrosian, one of Beneventan, one of Mozarabic, and several of neo-Gallican and Corsican. Schola Hungarica has also released several albums of non-Gregorian chants (of which their album of Ambrosian chant is especially impressive), as well as a large series of albums of Gregorian chant from Hungary. Ensemble Gilles Binchois focuses more on polyphony than the other two groups (although Ensemble Organum also has a bunch of albums of polyphony, including a truly over-the-top recording of Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame performed according to Peres’ theories of medieval polyphony using microtonal scales and Eastern ornamentation).
Guinastasia:
Me too. Blah. Mozartmuzak. Yawn.
My nomination: Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. I’m not condemning Strauss altogether, mind you – I love Also sprach zarathustra – but Heldenleben is one long sonic war between musicians utilizing their instruments as weapons. I’ve heard more musical automobile collisions.
The earliest composer I can listen to is, maybe, Telemann. Before that, it all sounds like wheezing or cats being tortured. I mean, there are reasons why those “original” instruments were replaced.
So much “early” music, as well as 20th-century, is devoid of any emotional content. What’s the point?
A music editor I once worked with told me that he thought Mozart could pack more emotion into one movement of a piano sonata than Mahler could into a five-movement symphony.
I don’t agree with that, but I thought I’d throw it out for comment, particularly from the Haydn/Mozart/early Beethoven lovers.
On another subject, I really LIKE adaptations. Glenn Gould’s last recording is of his own piano transcriptions of Wagner…the overture to Meistersingers, the Love/Death from Tristan, Siegfried’s Idyll, etc…and it gets lots of play around here. More recently, Uri Caine did some interesting transcriptions of other Wagnerian interludes for string quintet, piano, and accordion (!)
I also am fond of those transcriptions of Mozart’s operatic arias for wind band (generally oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons) that were made up for performance in European park gazebos during the 19th century.
Hell, I even like Stokowski’s orchestrations of Bach. Although you have to be in one peculiar mood to put them on.
Fascinating, Uke. Every time a classical compilation gets to a Mozart excerpt it strikes me as having all the emotional content of supermarket aisle radio. “Eine Kleine Nachtmusic” would work as the soundtrack for “Lobotomies are Us”. Magic Flute is fluff without fervor. “Turkish March” is unusually (for him) tuneful and memorable, and probably ranks as one of his best strains, but juxtapose it with some of the emotionally vivid material of Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, or Holst and it sounds like an audiocapture from a video game or a saturday morn cartoon. I don’t listen to Mahler so often either but my impression of “Symphony of a Thousand” was of considerably more oomph and awe than anything I associate with Mozart.
Well, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” is a damn music-box tune…I wouldn’t call it representative of Mozart any more than I would “Fur Elise” of Beethoven.
Mozart’s late symphonies and concertos, his Coronation and Requiem masses, and nearly all his operas (even The Magic Flute; I just heard a very fine performance of it at the City Opera of New York, excellent arias from the Queen of the Night, both of 'em, and a VERY charming Papageno/Papagena duet) are more impressive showpieces for those who are wondering just why the heck he’s considered a genius.