Contemporary Classical: a Primer - Anne Midgette, WaPo

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Contemporary classical: a primer

By Anne Midgette, Published: August 19

“I’m writing to ask for advice,” the e-mail began. “I want to know more about contemporary music. Where should I start?”
I get letters like this every few months, and I am often puzzled about how to answer. Gone are the days when there was a fixed canon of “good” composers (or, worse, “approved” ones), and a critic told you what you were supposed to like. Today, musical taste has blown wide open. If you love music, chances are that you like lots of different things: Ornette Coleman and Bruce Springsteen and Dmitri Shostakovich and Sufjan Stevens. If you’re a longtime orchestra subscriber, you may be passionate about Brahms but leery of the unfamiliar names and sounds that occasionally emerge onto concert programs. And chances are, whatever you like, you are equally passionate about what you don’t like — even more passionate, in fact, to judge from some of the rest of my mail.
So here, O fictive reader, are answers to some of the questions that, over the years, I’ve heard you ask. These answers are the equivalent of a one-day tour of a major metropolis, pointing out a few highlights to give you a general sense of the landscape of living composers, hoping that you’ll return to visit, in depth, whatever grabs your interest. This is not a “best of” guide, but rather an aide to orientation: Whatever your individual taste, these are pieces worth exploring.
1.Why should I care about minimalism?
Minimalism is a frustratingly incorrect term for a compositional approach that developed in the second half of the 20th century and that, in hindsight, turns out to be the most important contribution the United States has made to the field of composition.
“Minimalism” is a flawed term because most of the composers associated with it — notably Steve Reich and Philip Glass — reject it. It’s also a term that inspires fear and loathing in the hearts of some listeners who think it describes works that simply do the same thing over and over and over and over again — like passages of Glass's seminal and divisive 1976 opera “Einstein on the Beach.” “It’s not music,” say detractors.
Ah, but it is. Even the earliest seminal works of so-called minimalism share a lyric freshness. They do indeed take a step away from the conventional narrative of traditional classical music forms. Rather than taking a theme and develop it, they put musical elements together and let them shift into different, ever-changing combinations, like images in a kaleidoscope. The classic example is Terry Riley’s “In C” from 1964, consisting of 53 numbered phrases that are played by any number of musicians, lasting anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of hours, creating a dreamy, beguiling, mutable colorscape in the process. Equally iconic is Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” which references influences all the way back to medieval chant in the way it revolves around the same 11 chords, played at different speeds, within the compass of individual human breaths.
And the real hallmark of so-called minimalist music is not its repetition but this way of approaching musical form. (Anton Bruckner, the 19th-century symphonic composer, has been called a proto-minimalist for the way he juxtaposes great blocks of sound.) As minimalist ideas have evolved, the genre’s sounds have become ever richer. Louis Andriessen, the maverick Dutch composer, has jokingly called himself a “maximalist” (check out his huge, powerful opera-oratorio “De Materie” to hear the way he creates powerful music out of layers of sound). John Adams, who used to be seen as a young minimalist, now writes scores with veritably Wagnerian overtones for full orchestra and/or opera. (My favorite introduction to Adams is “Harmonium,” a big, shining, early piece for chorus and orchestra that radiantly sets texts by John Donne and Emily Dickinson, ending in a whirl of taut, bright sound.)
Bottom line: “Minimalism” isn’t the threat to classical music’s bastion that some people have perceived it to be. Instead, it has provided a new strain of energy and ideas that have helped revivify the field and continues to influence new works, even by composers who aren’t labeled “minimalist” at all.
2. I like traditional orchestral music. Why can’t they just go on writing that?
They can, and they do. The conventional wisdom is that contemporary music in the 20th century was taken over by serialism, a compositional technique that involves creating music according to series of values other than melody and harmony. (The most notorious serialist technique is 12-tone music, which creates a musical phrase by combining all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in a fixed order, and then uses that phrase as the basis of a musical work.) The resulting works are sometimes fascinating, but seem difficult and unappealing to some lay audiences; and (still following the conventional wisdom) a generation of composers shied away from serialist strictures. Minimalism was one reaction; neo-romanticism — a return to the melodic, tonal, timbral values of romantic music — was another. This story is a little too pat — for one thing, neo-romanticism has been a force in American music throughout the 20th century (see Samuel Barber) — but it’s certainly true that David Del Tredici, for one, got a lot of attention back in the 1980s when he turned from serialist orthodoxy and began writing big, lush scores for full orchestra (including “Final Alice”).
Like minimalism, neo-romanticism is a facile and not entirely accurate label. It’s often applied, for instance, to John Corigliano, who writes well for orchestra and with an acute sense of the past — his 1991 opera “The Ghosts of Versailles” is one of the best syntheses of the grand opera tradition and contemporary music that anyone’s managed to come up with — but whose sensibility, sound, and sophistication are firmly rooted in the present. The neo-romantic sensibility, however, is kept most vividly alive in contemporary American opera, which tends to pursue a kind of Broadway-like accessibility in a tonal musical language, from William Bolcom’s “A View from the Bridge” to Jake Heggie’s recent “Moby-Dick.”
But neo-romanticism isn’t the only path composers use to access traditional forms with a fresh eye. Some of today’s most successful orchestral composers are writing symphonies and concertos — like Jennifer Higdon, whose Percussion Concerto won a Grammy in 2010, and whose Violin Concerto was recently recorded to great acclaim by Hilary Hahn (though not everyone shared my affection for her Piano Concerto at its NSO premiere). Higdon writes athletic, energetic music that’s smart and solid and wins over audiences, bright and forward-propelled as a Tour de France rider.
Another acclaimed recent concerto was written by the Finnish composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, best known in this country for the years he spent as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1992-2009). His Piano Concerto sounds as if it had been written to reassure those who were worried that, when he stepped down from the post to devote himself entirely to composing, he was going to float off into the world of the avant-garde. Without losing the quirky touch of his earlier compositions, this concerto is rife with references to its virtuosic predecessors in the canon: You can hear hints of Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Ravel in what amounts to one long finger-busting, hyperactive, crowd-pleasing outburst. When a composer spends years conducting week in and week out, he sure ends up knowing how to write for an orchestra.
3.What about the younger generation? And what is this “alt-classical” stuff you keep praising?
“Younger generations” are notoriously slippery things in this field: Anybody under 50 still counts as “young.” “Young,” indeed, becomes more about an attitude than chronological age: Writing music that incorporates electric guitar and acoustic violin is now a hallmark of the 50-something set, from Steven Mackey, the guitarist turned Princeton teacher, to the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the performing arm of the eponymous composers’ collaborative formed by David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolf. The idea that good music can bring together a range of traditions, from rock to West African drumming to Javanese gamelan, is today a given for most younger composers, and emerges in surprising ways (like Lang’s “Little Match Girl Passion,” a translucent piece for small chorus that won him the Pulitzer Prize).
Another current trend that’s been on the rise over the last five decades is the return to the age of the composer-performer. Those who write music and want it performed go out and play it themselves — like Derek Bermel, a clarinet player whose Clarinet Concerto “Voices”mingles elements of a wide range of musics in ways both thoughtful and fun — or form their own bands, like Missy Mazzoli, whose group Victoire played the Library of Congress earlier this summer with music from their debut album.
“Alt-classical” is a term coined to describe the indie-rock sensibility of a lot of these genre-defying efforts, which are becoming ever more prevalent on every level of the musical establishment. Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra took the notable step last year of naming, as co-composers in residence, Mason Bates, who has an active career as a DJ as well as writing works for places like the San Francisco Symphony, and Anna Clyne, another 30-something who incorporates sampling and amplification in her music.
That’s not to say that all young composers are wedded exclusively to rock-inspired sounds: simply that genre boundaries no longer function as limits. Nico Muhly, who turns 30 this summer, is one of the most successful composers around, with two operas opening this calendar year (one, “Two Boys,” will appear at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013-14); a musical omnivore, he is inspired by everything from the English choral tradition to Icelandic pop to Philip Glass. And Jefferson Friedman, who has played with several rock groups, has written some of the best contemporary string quartets I know.
4. Tell me the names of some significant contemporary composers or pieces you think everyone should know.
Here are a few iconic works by a few major living composers whom I haven’t yet mentioned:
George Crumb, “Black Angels,” a searing expressionistic string quartet written during the Vietnam War by a distinctive musical maverick.
Meredith Monk, “Songs of Ascension,” the latest recording by one of our greatest innovators, rich treasure from the seam of expanded vocal techniques and artless sound juxtapositions that she’s been mining tirelessly for decades.
Frederic Rzewski, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated,” an hour-long, impassioned, political, eclectic set of variations (including shouting at the piano) on a Chilean protest song.
Elliott Carter, First String Quartet, a breakout work from 1951 that still sounds as radical and new as it did when it was written, by the grand old man of the 20th-century American establishment, who’s still going strong at 102.
Pierre Boulez, “Pli selon pli,” one of the longest and in many ways most beautiful pieces, a lyrical exegesis on poems by the French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme in which a high soprano soars over and around the instruments of the orchestra, written by a former lion of European serialism who has mellowed considerably in his later years.
Via Spotify, listen to the music from this story on our contemporary classical playlist. Read more about classical music on Anne Midgette’s blog, The Classical Beat.

© The Washington Post Company

The Greatest By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 21, 2011
The Greatest By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
HERE goes. This article completes my two-week project to select the top 10 classical music composers in history, not including those still with us. The argument, laid out in a series of articles, online videos and blog posts, was enlivened by the more than 1,500 informed, challenging, passionate and inspiring comments from readers of The New York Times. As often as I could, I answered direct questions online and jumped into the discussion.

I am about to reveal my list, though as those who have been with me on this quest already know, I’ve dropped hints along the way. And the winner, the all-time great, is ... Bach!

To step back for a moment, I began this project with bravado, partly as an intellectual game but also as a real attempt to clarify — for myself, as much as for anyone else — what exactly about the master composers makes them so astonishing. However preposterous the exercise may seem, when I found myself debating whether to push Brahms or Haydn off the list to make a place for Bartok or Monteverdi, it made me think hard about their achievements and greatness.

Ah, greatness. Early on I received a friendly challenge from a reader (“Scott”) who questioned the whole notion of greatness in music. He cited the title essay in “Listen to This,” a collection of astute, lively writings by Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker and my good friend, which was published last year (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this essay he argues that the very term “classical music” makes this vibrant art form seem dead. Indeed, as he writes, “greatness” and “seriousness” are not classical music’s defining characteristics; it can also “be stupid, vulgar and insane.”

All true. Yet what came through in the comments from readers and, I hope, my articles and videos is that for most of us these composers are not monumental idols but living, compelling presences. Just as we organize our lives by keeping those we love in a network of support, we do something similar with the composers we rely on.

I was moved by how many readers could not wait to share their lists of favorite composers, whom, naturally, they also considered the greats. Even many of those who dismissed the exercise jumped right in: “This is absurd, of course. But here’s my list. And don’t you dare leave out Mahler.” Or Berg. Or Ligeti. Or, from one Baroque music enthusiast, Albinoni!

As a longtime champion of contemporary music, I was gratified to receive so many objections to my decision to eliminate living composers from consideration. Still, for me there was no other way. We are too close to living composers to have perspective. Besides, assessing greatness is the last thing on your mind when you are listening to an involving, exciting or baffling new piece.

So humbled by the discerning music lovers who wrote in, I now offer my own list. And remember: my editors gave the go-ahead for this project on condition that I go all the way and rank my 10 in order.

My top spot goes to Bach, for his matchless combination of masterly musical engineering (as one reader put it) and profound expressivity. Since writing about Bach in the first article of this series I have been thinking more about the perception that he was considered old-fashioned in his day. Haydn was 18 when Bach died, in 1750, and Classicism was stirring. Bach was surely aware of the new trends. Yet he reacted by digging deeper into his way of doing things. In his austerely beautiful “Art of Fugue,” left incomplete at his death, Bach reduced complex counterpoint to its bare essentials, not even indicating the instrument (or instruments) for which these works were composed.

On his own terms he could be plenty modern. Though Bach never wrote an opera, he demonstrated visceral flair for drama in his sacred choral works, as in the crowd scenes in the Passions where people cry out with chilling vehemence for Jesus to be crucified. In keyboard works like the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, Bach anticipated the rhapsodic Romantic fervor of Liszt, even Rachmaninoff. And as I tried to show in the first video for this project, through his chorales alone Bach explored the far reaches of tonal harmony.

The obvious candidates for the second and third slots are Mozart and Beethoven. If you were to compare just Mozart’s orchestral and instrumental music to Beethoven’s, that would be a pretty even match. But Mozart had a whole second career as a path-breaking opera composer. Such incredible range should give him the edge.

Still, I’m going with Beethoven for the second slot. Beethoven’s technique was not as facile as Mozart’s. He struggled to compose, and you can sometimes hear that struggle in the music. But however hard wrought, Beethoven’s works are so audacious and indestructible that they survive even poor performances.

I had an epiphany about Beethoven during the early 1980s when I heard the composer Leon Kirchner conduct the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. He began with a Piston symphony, a fresh, inventive Neo-Classical piece from the 1950s. “La Mer” by Debussy came next, and Kirchner, who had studied with Schoenberg and had a Germanic orientation, brought weighty, Wagnerian intensity to this landmark score, completed in 1905. The Debussy came across as more modern than the Piston.

After intermission Peter Serkin joined Kirchner for a performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto that brought out the mysticism, poetic reverie and wildness of the music. The Beethoven sounded like the most radical work in the program by far: unfathomable and amazing. I’m giving Beethoven the second slot, and Mozart No. 3.

Four? Schubert. You have to love the guy, who died at 31, ill, impoverished and neglected except by a circle of friends who were in awe of his genius. For his hundreds of songs alone — including the haunting cycle “Winterreise,” which will never release its tenacious hold on singers and audiences — Schubert is central to our concert life. The baritone Sanford Sylvan once told me that hearing the superb pianist Stephen Drury give searching accounts of the three late Schubert sonatas on a single program was one of the most transcendent musical experiences of his life. Schubert’s first few symphonies may be works in progress. But the “Unfinished” and especially the Ninth Symphony are astonishing. The Ninth paves the way for Bruckner and prefigures Mahler.

Debussy, who after hundreds of years of pulsating Germanic music proved that there could be tension in timelessness, is my No. 5. With his pioneering harmonic language, the sensual beauty of his sound and his uncanny, Freudian instincts for tapping the unconscious, Debussy was the bridge over which music passed into the tumultuous 20th century.

One who later walked that bridge was Stravinsky, my No. 6. During the years when “The Firebird” and “The Rite of Spring” were shaking up Paris, Stravinsky was swapping ideas with his friend Debussy, who was 20 years older. Yet Stravinsky was still around in the 1960s, writing serial works that set the field of contemporary music abuzz. One morning in 1971 I arrived at the door of the music building at Yale, on which someone had posted an index card with this simple news: “Igor Stravinsky died today.” It felt as if the floor had dropped out from under the musical world I inhabited. Stravinsky had been like a Beethoven among us.

I’m running out of slots. In some ways, as I wrote to one reader, either a list of 5 or a list of 20 would have been much easier. By keeping it to 10, you are forced to look for reasons to push out, say, Handel or Shostakovich to make a place for someone else.

Some musicians I respect have no trouble finding shortcomings in Brahms. He did sometimes become entangled in an attempt to extend the Classical heritage while simultaneously taking progressive strides into new territory. But at his best (the symphonies, the piano concertos, the violin concerto, the chamber works with piano, the solo piano pieces, especially the late intermezzos and capriccios that point the way to Schoenberg) Brahms has the thrilling grandeur and strangeness of Beethoven. Brahms is my No. 7.

In an earlier installment of this series I tried to weasel out of picking Romantic composers other than Brahms by arguing that the era fostered originality and personal expression above all. To a genius like Chopin, having a distinctive voice and giving vent to his inspirations were more important than achieving some level of quantifiable greatness.

But the dynamic duo of 19th-century opera, Verdi and Wagner, aimed high. As I already let slip, they both make my list. That a new production of a Verdi opera, like Willy Decker’s spare, boldly reimagined staging of “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera, can provoke such heated passions among audiences is testimony to the enduring richness of Verdi’s works. A production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle has become the entry card for any opera company that wants to be considered big time. The last 20 minutes of “Die Walküre” may be the most sadly beautiful music ever written.

But who ranks higher? They may be tied as composers but not as people. Though Verdi had an ornery side, he was a decent man, an Italian patriot and the founder of a retirement home for musicians still in operation in Milan. Wagner was an anti-Semitic, egomaniacal jerk who transcended himself in his art. So Verdi is No. 8 and Wagner No. 9.

One slot left. May Haydn forgive me, but one of the Vienna Four just had to go, and Haydn’s great legacy was carried out by his friend Mozart, his student Beethoven and the entire Classical movement. My apologies to Mahler devotees, so impressively committed to this visionary composer. Would that I could include my beloved Puccini.

I was heartened by the hundreds of readers who championed 20th-century composers like Ligeti, Messiaen, Shostakovich, Ives, Schoenberg, Prokofiev and Copland, all of whom are central to my musical life. Then there is Berg, who wrote arguably the two greatest operas of the 20th century. His Violin Concerto, as I explained in my first video, would make my list of top 10 pieces. I was disappointed that an insignificant number of readers made a case for Britten. I have some advocacy work to do.

I received the most forceful challenges from readers who thought that pre-Bach composers simply had to be included, especially Monteverdi. Though Monteverdi did not invent opera, he took one look at what was going in Florence around 1600 and figured out how this opera thing should really be done. In 1607 he wrote “Orfeo,” the first great opera. His books of madrigals brought the art of combining words and music to new heights. The Monteverdi contingent is probably right.

But forced to pick only one more composer, I’m going with Bartok. In an earlier piece I made my case for Bartok, as an ethnomusicologist whose work has empowered generations of subsequent composers to incorporate folk music and classical traditions from whatever culture into their works, and as a formidable modernist who in the face of Schoenberg’s breathtaking formulations showed another way, forging a language that was an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales and atonal wanderings.

So that’s my list.

And now, in an act of contrition, I am beginning a personal project to listen nonstop to recordings of Britten, Haydn, Chopin, Monteverdi, Ligeti and those composers whom I could not squeeze in but whose music carries me through my days.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 23, 2011


A picture caption on Page 19 this weekend with the continuation of a cover article about the 10 greatest classical composers misspells the given name of Verdi. He was Giuseppe Verdi, not Guiseppe.

The Top 10 Composers: The Romantics By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 19, 2011, 7:00 am

The Top 10 Composers: The Romantics By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Anthony Tommasini has been exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos and vote for your own top 10 here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Friday.

In my exercise of sorting through the great composers of history to determine the Top 10, I have been putting off dealing with the 19th-century Romantic era (except for those giants of opera, Verdi and Wagner, who have already made the cut). But there is a reason. Music lovers have long been understandably enthralled with Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and their Romantic brethren. For better or worse, their works still dominate the standard repertory. Yet their music is so personal and idiosyncratic that it is hard to assess it in terms of greatness.

Frederic ChopinThese creators are not called Romantics for nothing. The Romantic movement emerged from the Classical heritage, in which composers expressed themselves through large, formal structures: symphony, sonata, string quartet, concerto. But the Romantic aesthetic emboldened composers to be more passionate, rhapsodic and personal. Formal structures were loosened, as music became a channel for strongly individual, often quirky, even eccentric expression. Literature, nature and history were favorite sources of inspiration.

Chopin, the most original genius of the 19th century, is a good example. Striving for greatness was the last thing on his mind. Chopin had his own select list of past greats he revered, topped by Bach and Mozart. And he loved bel canto opera, especially by that melancholic melodist Bellini.

But the Beethoven symphonic imperative that hung over and intimidated his fellow composers meant nothing to Chopin. He did not care about writing large, formal works, certainly not symphonies. Even his Second and Third Piano Sonatas (the First is an early work), though astounding, are completely unconventional. Chopin respected his composer colleagues, but he was not especially interested in their work. He was a pianist who composed. To him there was no distinction between the activities. And he seldom performed piano works by other composers.

Beethoven consciously strove to be great, even titanic, and he thought he was. His legacy is defined by intimidating bodies of symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas and more, now canonic. How does an individualist like Chopin “rank” in comparison? Chopin’s ethereal nocturnes, poetic ballades, audacious scherzos, aptly titled impromptus and lacy waltzes often sound like written-out improvisations.

I don’t think Chopin expected his 58 mazurkas to be widely appreciated. On the surface these pieces are lilting Polish dances, but only on the surface. Listen more closely, and even the jaunty mazurkas are quizzical, wistful and poetic. The dreamy ones can be almost unbearably confessional. Of course, when any of his published music sold well, Chopin was delighted.

Schumann was a somewhat different story, since he embraced that Beethoven symphonic imperative. Schumann tried to write big pieces — symphonies, oratorios, elaborate chamber works — and many of these scores are stirring. But he was a troubled soul, with a keen intellect and a fantastical imagination. His music is even quirkier and more idiosyncratic than Chopin’s. For me, his best works are the piano pieces.

During my graduate school years, one of the Schumann works I learned, performed and became almost obsessed with was the “Davidsbündlertänze,” a suite of dances that presents Schumann at his most astonishing. Schumann made up two inner personalities for himself: Eusebius, the dreamer, and Florestan, the impetuous rebel. Each of these dances is signed at the end with an E or an F to indicate which of his alter egos composed it. (A couple of them are signed E and F.) Now try evaluating such a piece in a cool consideration of the greatest composers.

And so it goes during the freewheeling Romantic era.

Liszt? As a comprehensive musician (pianist, composer, conductor, major champion of composers like Wagner), Liszt was arguably the most influential figure of the 19th century. Still, there is nothing to do with his exhilaratingly virtuosic, wildly experimental, moody, restless and radical music other than to listen in wonder. But a top 10 composer? I don’t think so.

Berlioz? Sometimes it is said of a composer that he had great talent but no genius. Well, you could waggishly say the opposite of Berlioz: he had great genius but no talent. There is a little truth to this. Just conceiving pieces as amazing as the “Symphonie Fantastique” (written when he was 26, in 1830, only three years after Beethoven had died), let alone the poetically epic opera “Les Troyens,” took staggering genius. Yet except for the brilliantly imaginative orchestration, the nuts-and-bolts musical elements in Berlioz can often sound awkward.

Tchaikovsky’s enduring popularity has not helped his reputation in intellectual artistic circles. When in lectures and writings Stravinsky spoke so respectfully of Tchaikovsky’s music, his endorsement caused avant-garde modernists who had patronized Tchaikovsky to reconsider. Today Tchaikovsky is both respected by composers and loved by the public.

And then there is Brahms.

Among the Romantics, Brahms — born in 1833, a generation after the Chopin-Schumann first wave — stands out as the one composer who most coveted a place in the Beethovenian lineage. He could be terribly insecure. Brahms destroyed as many of his scores as he released for performance and publication. He was so in awe of Beethoven that it took him a dozen years to write his first symphony. But once he got that off his back, he wrote his next symphony during a few productive months.

Brahms also wrote epic concertos, sonatas and chamber works that at once honored and utterly transformed the Classical forms. In some ways he was a true Classicist. Yet for the Brahms centennial in 1933, Schoenberg gave a talk called “Brahms the Progressive,” pointing to Brahms for examples of harmonic writing that anticipated the breakdown of tonality. Last year the pianist Shai Wosner released a recording of works by Brahms and Schoenberg. At the center of the program, Mr. Wosner plays Brahms’s Opus 116 Fantasies, a set of seven late piano pieces. Between the Brahms works he inserts elliptical movements from Schoenberg’s Six Short Piano Pieces, and it is amazing how easily Brahms’s chromatic harmonies mingle with Schoenberg’s atonal writing. These composers seem to be speaking slightly different dialects of the same language.

Anyway, I’m still in a quandary about where to place Chopin and Schumann and their Romantic brethren. But Brahms is looking pretty good.

Top 10 Composers: The Female Factor By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 18, 2011, 3:58 pm

Top 10 Composers: The Female Factor By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Anthony Tommasini has been exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos and vote for your own top 10 here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Friday.

As my two-week project to identify the top 10 composers in history has been rolling out, I have been wondering whether any readers would write in asking why no female composers are under consideration. Few have even been mentioned as long-shot contenders.

Well, some strong advocates of female composers have now spoken up, especially Elizabeth M. Williams, who proposed that, at the very least, there might be a separate, female top 10 project. Among the candidates she proposed, excluding living composers, are Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford Seeger and more.

The sad truth is that until relatively recent decades, women have had severely limited opportunities within all the arts, especially music and, even more, composition. Some of the prejudice stemmed from the deep-seated male chauvinism of Western culture. Mozart’s older sister Nannerl, for example, though not as talented as Wolfgang (has anyone been as talented as our Wolfgang?), was an accomplished prodigy who was initially sent on showcase tours with her brother. If the conditions for women had been more favorable, Nannerl might have been encouraged to continue with music and become a professional. Instead, once she grew out of the cute little girl prodigy stage, she was directed on a path toward marriage. She eventually settled down with a twice-widowed Austrian prefect who had five children, and she lived to 78 (while her high-stressed brother died at 35).

But the main reason, I think, that there were so few female composers during the glory centuries of classical music is that composers depend on performing musicians and ensembles to play their works, and until relatively recent times, musicians, ensembles and musical institutions were overwhelmingly male.

There were a significant number of female novelists, poets and painters in earlier times. But if you were a Jane Austen, you could sit at home and write your novels. As long as you found a sympathetic publisher, you could get your books distributed and be acknowledged. Compare this to the situation facing Clara Schumann, one of the most celebrated pianists of the 19th century. She was also a gifted composer, though she mostly wrote piano pieces, songs, chamber works: things that she and a circle of musician friends could perform. If she had tried to compose symphonies and operas, even she, for all her renown, would have hit a dead end with male orchestras and opera companies, which would have been unwilling to champion the works of a woman. So why bother?

There would be several obvious female contenders for a list of top 10 novelists. Or poets. But consider this: Where are the great female playwrights of earlier centuries? Again, this is the same problem as with female composers: what theater company was willing to present plays by women?

The last 50 years, especially the last couple of decades, have brought expanding opportunities for women in music. Our orchestras are filled with female players. In most conservatories, usually half of the composition students are women these days. A list of important living composers would absolutely include many women, among them Kaija Saariaho, Sofia Gubaidulina, Libby Larsen, Judith Weir, Joan Tower, Chen Yi, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Augusta Read Thomas, Jennifer Higdon and more. So if we have a top 10 composers survey 100 years from now, the finalists might well include both sexes. For now, alas, my list is all male.

An earlier version of this post included Ms. Larsen in the list of female composers who are not living, as clearly noted later in the post, she is thankfully alive.

Top 10 Composers: Hailing Opera’s Shakespeare, and Its Proust By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 17, 2011, 7:00 am

Top 10 Composers: Hailing Opera’s Shakespeare, and Its Proust By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

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Anthony Tommasini has been exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos and vote for your own top 10 here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.

Having skipped ahead to the 20th century in our ambitious quest to identify the top 10 classical composers of all time, let’s shift back to the crowded and complex 19th century. And let’s start with the dynamic duo of 19th-century opera, Verdi and Wagner.

Opera, you could argue (and many readers have), is a different animal. But Verdi and Wagner were great students of Beethoven, and their operas have symphonic sweep, architectonic integrity and orchestral richness galore. In addition, you cannot discount their enduring popularity.

Verdi is an ideal case of a composer who came from a definite tradition that laid out the protocols and practices of how to write an opera. All his life he balanced honoring tradition with striking out on new paths. Each opera, almost without exception, was better, bolder, more masterly and more personal than the one before, right until the end, when, in his 70s, he wrote his final masterpieces, “Otello” and “Falstaff.”

“Don Carlo” is the “Hamlet” of Italian opera. If the plots of some works are nonsensical, Verdi embraced musical drama not as a way to present neat little narratives but as a chance to bring to life flawed and lost characters caught up in complex relationships, especially those between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. Sorting out the political factions and power plays of “Simon Boccanegra” may be impossible. But the opera is like a bleak morality tale that shows how rash actions taken in your youth can fatalistically set the course of your life. The tenor Plácido Domingo had an improbable triumph last season at the Metropolitan Opera singing Simon, a touchstone Verdi baritone role. The opera returns to the Met this week with a compelling baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, in the lead.

Verdi should not be blamed for his own popularity nor tainted by the excessive devotion of the most fanatical opera buffs. Those who dispute the sophistication of his craft don’t know what they’re talking about.

Let me defer to a rather authoritative voice, that of Stravinsky. In his book “Poetics of Music,” Stravinsky challenges the assertion that the early Verdi works, steeped in the traditions of Italian opera and thick with oom-pah-pah arias, are somehow negligible, and that only with the more experimental operas of his later years did Verdi reach his potential.

“I know that I am going counter to the general opinion that sees Verdi’s best work in the deterioration of the genius that gave us ‘Rigoletto,’ ‘Il Trovatore,’ ‘Aida’ and ‘La Traviata,’ ” Stravinsky wrote. But, he added, “I maintain that there is more substance and true invention in the aria ‘La donna è mobile,’ for example, in which this elite saw nothing but deplorable facility, than in the rhetoric and vociferations of the ‘Ring.’ ”

I disagree with Stravinsky about Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But the elite he was referring to were his fellow composers, and Stravinsky’s astute defense of Verdi shook up contemporary music circles.

Consider Verdi’s specific skills as a composer. Orchestration? Listen to the diaphanous opening of the Nile scene in “Aida.” Counterpoint? The greatest fugue in opera is the joyous concluding ensemble scored for soloists, chorus and orchestra at the end of “Falstaff.” And speaking of “Falstaff,” there is an episode in Act III that might seem like a throwaway moment, when Falstaff, as he has been instructed, arrives in Windsor Forest at night for what he thinks will be a romantic assignation. As distant chimes strike midnight, he counts off the hours (“Una, due, tre, …”). Each is accompanied with a different chord in the orchestra, an ingenious and haunting harmonic progression.

For Stravinsky, there was just too much bombast in Wagner. I certainly understand what he meant. Still, the more I immerse myself in the Wagner operas, the more staggering they seem.

Wagner was a nasty guy who transcended himself in his works. He and his followers produced a lot of hype about the Gesamtkunstwerk concept: opera as an ideal amalgam of all the arts. Yet cut through the aesthetic verbiage, and Wagner pulls it off. A great performance of “Tristan und Isolde” in a compelling production offers an artistic immersion like no other.

Musically, Wagner was a pioneering figure without whom Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and even Debussy (though he hated to admit it) would have been impossible. You have to look at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel murals or Proust’s seven-volume novel “In Search of Lost Time” to find a work in any field as ambitious and arresting as Wagner’s “Ring.” Yet for all the work’s mystical trappings and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, it is a humane, wise and moving story of the imperious god Wotan and his dysfunctional family, who bring about their own destruction.

Perhaps too much is made of Wagner’s leitmotifs: the technique of fashioning brief musical motifs for crucial characters, objects, places and philosophical themes (fate, death, renunciation) in his operas. Yet the masterly way he manipulates, develops and transforms these motifs has never been equaled in opera. His model here, I think, was Beethoven, the ultimate master of motivic development. Wagner honored Beethoven, one of his heroes, by adapting the technique to opera.

This much I’m giving away now: Verdi and Wagner make my list. Both of them.

Top 10 Composers: Which 20th-Century Masters Will Make the Cut? By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 12, 2011, 8:42 am

Top 10 Composers: Which 20th-Century Masters Will Make the Cut? By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
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Over the next two weeks Anthony Tommasini is exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos and vote for your own top 10 here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.

The 19th century will pose the toughest calls in our whimsical attempt to identify the top 10 classical composers of all time. Think of Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky. And what about Verdi and Wagner? So let me deal with the 20th century first, see how many slots might still be left, and work backward.

Though Debussy was born in 1862 and died in 1918, this path-breaker has to be considered a 20th-century giant. After some 300 years of pulsating Germanic music, for Debussy to come along and write such hauntingly restrained, ethereal, time-stands-still works was a shock to the system. His thick yet transparent block chords; his harmonies tinged with ancient modal elements; his preference for whole-tone scales that loosened music’s moorings to traditional tonality; his mastery of delicate orchestral colorings and new ways of writing for the piano: all this and more made him the father of modern music. Composers from Stravinsky to Boulez would have been impossible without Debussy’s example.

For the subject of his only complete opera he chose Maeterlinck’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” a groundbreaking work of Symbolist theater from 1893. Debussy’s Impressionist music, full of veiled harmonies, blurry textures and emotional ambiguity, hauntingly taps the subliminal stirrings of this mysterious story of a sullen royal family in a timeless, placeless kingdom. In the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production Simon Rattle, in his Met debut, conducted a stunning account of this unorthodox opera, first performed in 1902. What other 20th-century work continues to sound as radical?

Stravinsky, by the way, though I am still formulating this list, will surely make the cut. One fascinating element of his achievement is that among a very select roster of great composers in history, Stravinsky is the only one to have made his reputation by writing ballet scores, with the possible exception of Tchaikovsky.

Everyone acknowledges the impact of Stravinsky’s Paris ballets, especially that all-time stunner “The Rite of Spring” from 1913. His later work with the choreographer George Balanchine was one of the most important collaborations in the history of the arts. Stravinsky was inspired to write astonishing scores for Balanchine, like “Orpheus” and “Apollo.” But Balanchine found Stravinsky’s music so choreographic that he seized even on pieces like the Violin Concerto and the late, 12-tone Movements for Piano and Orchestra and conscripted them for duty in ballet.

Stravinsky’s works during his lengthy period of Neo-Classicism are still underappreciated. I love that these pieces are, essentially, music about other music. “The Rake’s Progress” is an ingenious, amusing and profound opera on its own terms. It is also Stravinsky’s savvy, admiring musical commentary on Mozart opera. When he finally started writing 12-tone works (adapting the technique to his own ends), even those scores were Neo-Classical in a sense. The 12-tone thing had been around for a while, and the movement was losing steam. So Stravinsky’s 12-tone pieces were like commentaries on the 12-tone phenomenon.

Theorists and composers are still trying to figure out exactly how the elusive harmonic language in Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical scores (like the Symphony in Three Movements and the overlooked Piano Sonata) actually works. His pieces do not give up their secrets easily. The “Symphony of Psalms” for chorus and unconventional orchestra (with no violins and violas but two pianos) is the most gravely beautiful and profound sacred work of the 20th century. Leonard Bernstein once said that the opening chords of the third movement alone, in which the chorus sings a bittersweet, almost resigned setting of the word “Alleluia,” would have ensured Stravinsky’s place in history. That was Bernstein in his exuberant mode, but he had a point.

What’s more, including the Russian-born Stravinsky in my list brings some geographical diversity to the Top 10.

The composer I yearn to include is Benjamin Britten. In many ways, Britten is thriving. At least a half-dozen of his operas have become staples, and his symphonic and chamber works turn up all the time on programs. If there are finer 20th-century works for voice and orchestra than “Les Illuminations” and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. I don’t know what they are. Still, I am probably in a minority in rating him quite this high. I predict that his stock will rise steadily over the next 50 years. Still, Top 10? Am I going to push out Haydn for Britten?

Among other 20th-century giants, however, I am leaning toward making a place for Bartok. It’s not just that Bartok was a visionary composer with an arresting and original voice. He could write works in a popular vein, like the Concerto for Orchestra, that are still rich with subtle complexities and ingenious strokes and his characteristic propulsive rhythms. Yet he also wrote uncompromisingly modern and experimental pieces, like the six string quartets, pieces he assumed would never catch on with the public. He would be amazed that today his quartets are as essential to the repertory as Beethoven’s.

Bartok’s other pivotal contribution came from his field research into folk music and indigenous musical traditions of Eastern Europe. He was an early ethnomusicologist. The music he encountered fundamentally altered his perceptions as a composer. Sometimes he more or less transcribed the folk music into suitable pieces for the concert hall. But in subtler ways he folded unconventional elements of the indigenous songs, dances and dirges into his own mature style. Even when he is not explicitly borrowing some folk tune, Bartok’s music is run through with the earthy strangeness of Eastern European folk music. His example inspired countless composers, from Lou Harrison to Osvaldo Golijov, to explore folk music and classical traditions from Asia, South America or wherever their backgrounds and interests took them.

Also — and maybe this is where my own concerns come into play — Bartok’s role in forging new pathways for music in the early decades of the 20th century was pivotal. Schoenberg’s analysis that the system of tonality was in crisis was spot on. Yet the solution he proposed, 12-tone music, while an audacious and exhilarating leap, appeared as inevitable — that is, the next step in the evolution — only to Schoenberg and his acolytes.

Bartok showed another way. His arresting harmonic language was an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales, atonal wanderings and more. Theorists still haven’t broken down Bartok’s language. But concertgoers, who don’t have such concerns, continue to be swept away by the originality and mystery of his music. A work like the Third String Quartet seems as stunningly modern today as it was in 1927. Yet it is a mainstay of the string quartet repertory.

So whom are we missing? Any votes for Shostakovich? Prokofiev? Messiaen? Ligeti?

Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four, Part 2 By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 11, 2011, 7:00 am

Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four, Part 2 By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
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Over the next two weeks Anthony Tommasini is exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.

In an earlier post, Mr. Tommasini began a discussion on the Vienna four. It continues here with Mozart…

Mozart knew all about motivic development too. But the technique did not come as naturally to him. He was a theater man at heart. It’s inspiring to see the sketches for the Mozart operas, in which all he writes are the vocal lines fitted to the words, and a bass line below, with a few chords here and there. Clearly, setting the text and getting the dramatic structure of the opera was the first task and the hard part. Filling in all the rest came later, which, for Mozart, was fairly easy if time-consuming.

When Mozart wanted to write a symphony or chamber work in the Haydn manner, as a motif-driven entity, he could certainly do it. Think of his last three symphonies or the six quartets he dedicated to Haydn. But it took great effort, as he admitted in the moving dedication of those quartets.

Still, even Mozart’s sonatas and symphonies are full of operatic touches. When I was in music school, I was always baffled when fellow pianists who claimed to love the Mozart piano concertos and sonatas said that they had no real feeling for the operas, not being opera buffs. How can you play, say, Mozart’s Sonata in D (K. 311) without being immersed in the Mozart operas? The Rondo comes across like some duet from “The Marriage of Figaro.” In the main theme you can almost hear Susanna, as she coyly tries to charm her way out of a tight spot with her doting, jealous Figaro, who voices his suspicions in gruff bursts leading to the second theme.

The argument for Mozart as the greatest composer ever would be based on his astounding versatility: he is at the top, both as a maker of opera and as a composer of symphonic and chamber works. That he died at 35 was horrible. On the other hand, he had an early start. And how do you top “Don Giovanni” and the “Jupiter” Symphony?

But that Schubert died at 31 is for me the greatest loss in music history. Even though he wrote an astonishing number of works, in so many ways he was just getting going. In his last years he started to restudy counterpoint because he thought his skills were insufficient.

In his mature piano sonatas, chamber works and songs, Schubert, like Beethoven, entered some mystic place beyond era and cultural context. Think of the Sonata in A minor (D. 784), which in the opening movement veers with no warning from an eerily self-contained main theme through bursts of crazed chords and tremolos to a deceptively tranquil second theme, flowing by like some wistful folk song, only to be interrupted by slashing fortissimo chords.

If only for the hundreds of his songs that dominate the song repertory today and continue to stun, entrance and delight audiences, Schubert should make the cut. Right?

Yet one of these Vienna masters will have to be eliminated if we are going to leave spots for the giants of the 19th and 20th centuries. Might it be Haydn? Part of his legacy was carried on by his student Beethoven and his younger friend Mozart. I know musicians and critics who would howl at the idea that Haydn, who pioneered the string quartet and wrote some of the greatest works in that genre, would not be among the Top 5, let alone the top 10. What to do? For now, let’s put it off.

Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 10, 2011, 12:04 pm

Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

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For any attempt to determine the top 10 classical composers in history, like the one we embarked on in the Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, the Viennese Classical period presents a special challenge. If such a list is to be at all diverse and comprehensive, how could 4 of the 10 slots go to composers — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert — who worked in Vienna during, say, the 75 years from 1750 to 1825? What on earth was going on there to foster such achievement?

The only Vienna native of the four was Schubert. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), the son of a wheelwright, was born in lower Austria. But by the age of 8 he was a choirboy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. He was booted out of the choir when his voice changed in his late teens, and he became a freelance composer, performer and teacher. So during his childhood and young adult years, Haydn was immersed in the greatest music of Germanic culture.

At 29 he went to work for Prince Paul Esterhazy, who died in 1762 and was succeeded by his brother Nikolaus, a passionate music lover. Haydn spent nearly 30 years presiding over the musical activities at the prince’s palace 30 miles outside Vienna as well as at the summer residence over the border in Hungary. Still, during these decades Haydn was a regular visitor to Vienna, where he presented his works, soaked up musical life, made friends (with Mozart, among others) and joined a Masonic lodge. In 1790, the prince having died, Haydn moved back to Vienna, a beloved master (Papa Haydn) and popular composer.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), though born in Salzburg, spent extended periods of his childhood as a prodigy on tour throughout Europe. The arduous trips undermined his health and nearly killed him a couple of times. When these ventures failed to produce a patron or coveted position, Leopold Mozart compelled his son to buckle down and settle in Salzburg. But Wolfgang, itching to get to the big city, made his break at 25 and lived in Vienna until his death, through periods of triumph and exasperation, writing his greatest works during his last, heady decade.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was born in Bonn, Germany, the son of a drunken, abusive court singer. He tried to escape to Vienna at 16 but had to return to stabilize the family when his mother’s health deteriorated. Six years later he was back in Vienna, and he never left. He soon became a towering figure there, his path-breaking works both intriguing and baffling listeners, including his former teacher Haydn.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was born in Vienna to an impoverished schoolteacher and briefly became a teacher, until he threw himself into music and lived as a struggling freelance composer at a time when the patronage system was breaking down. Still, Schubert had a support system of friends and musicians who adored him and were sure they had a genius in their midst.

So what was going on in Vienna to make it such a hotbed of musical creativity? Do not presume that cultural life was especially enlightened or that the average Viennese music lover was uncommonly sophisticated. As Harvey Sachs points out in his recent book, “The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824,” terms like “crossover,” “kitsch” and “dumbing down” could easily have been applied to the Vienna of Beethoven’s day, and the typical citizen “clamored to hear the forebears of today’s virtuoso firebrands, schlock-mongers and half-pop, half-serious opera singers.”

Yet clearly there were musically astute listeners, as well as informed monarchs and patrons, who got what was going on. Haydn is often called the father of the symphony as it came to be known. I’d throw in the father of the string quartet and the piano sonata. Haydn was a pioneer in figuring out how to write a sizable multimovement instrumental piece that sounded organized and whole, an entity. The system of sophisticated tonal harmony had developed to the point where a genius like Haydn could figure out how to process themes and manipulate key areas to dramatic effect throughout the many sections of a long work. Moreover, Haydn was the first great master of what is called motivic development, in which bits and pieces of music — a few notes, a melodic twist, a rhythmic gesture — become the building blocks for an entire symphony in several movements.

Haydn passed this technique on to his recalcitrant student Beethoven, who, for all his notions of having invented himself, was deeply indebted to Haydn. Beethoven took the technique of motivic development even further. If you were going to make a case for Beethoven as the greatest composer in history, you would base it on his ability to make a long work, like the “Eroica” Symphony, seem like a musical monument in motion. For all the episodic shifts and turns of this piece, as it plows through four dramatically contrasting movements, most of the music is generated from a handful of motifs that you hear at the beginning.

Then, in his late phase, Beethoven entered a realm that transcended eras and periods. By then completely deaf, Beethoven touched the mystical. Every time I play the first piece from the Six Bagatelles (Op. 126), Beethoven’s last work for piano, I am stunned all over again. This seemingly modest little piece (as its title implies), just a single page of music, with its deceptively simple melody, is wondrous strange, almost cosmic.

Next Post Coming Soon: Vienna Four Part 2, Mozart and Schubert

Over the next two weeks Anthony Tommasini is exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.

The Greatest By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 7, 2011
The Greatest By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
YOU know that a new year has truly arrived when critics stop issuing all those lists of the best films, books, plays, recordings and whatever of the year gone by. These lists seem to be popular with readers, and they stir up lively reactions. Like other critics I enjoy recalling the pieces and performances that struck me as exceptionally good, or exceptionally bad, during the year in classical music.

Yet in other fields, critics and insiders think bigger. Film institutes periodically issue lists of the greatest films of all time. (“Citizen Kane” seems to have a lock on the top spot.) Rock magazines routinely tally the greatest albums ever. And think of professional tennis, with its system of rankings, telling you exactly which player is No. 1 in the world, or 3, or 59.

Imagine if we could do the same in classical music, if there were ways to rank pianists, sopranos and, especially, composers. The Top 10 composers of all time. Now that’s the list I have secretly wanted to compile. It would be absurd, of course, but fascinating.

Hold on here. I don’t do ranking. As I see it, the critic’s job description does not include compiling lists of greats in order of greatness. What I do is champion, demystify and describe the composers, works and artists I admire, and, as appropriate, puncture inflated reputations.

I am eager to share my enthusiasm for, say, my favorite Britten opera (I think I would pick “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) or my favorite recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto (Jascha Heifetz, with Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony: a minority opinion, I suspect, but what a thrilling performance). To say that something is your favorite is not to insist that it has to be anyone else’s or that it belongs at the top of a list of all-time greats.

My thinking about this was shaken, though, last spring, when Mohammed e-mailed me. That’s Mohammed Rahman, then a freshman at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He was writing a paper on why people have different musical tastes, and he wanted to interview me. His questions were so thoughtful that I met him at a cafe.

Mohammed picked my brain about how my tastes had been formed, about what I looked for in good music. Inevitably we came to the question of how it gets decided that certain music, certain composers are the best. And of course some really are. I’m open-minded but not a radical relativist.

So if you were to try to compile a list of the 10 greatest composers in history, how would you go about it? For me the resulting list would not be the point. But the process of coming up with such a list might be clarifying and instructive, as well as exasperating and fun.

What criteria might you apply? Would a composer’s influence and popularity factor in? Schoenberg was arguably the most influential composer of the 20th century. That he pushed tonality past the brink and devised a technique to supersede it completely shook up the music of the era. Every composer in his wake had to come to terms with Schoenberg. But on the basis of his actual pieces, many of which excite and move me, does he make the Top 10?

What about a composer whose range was narrow but whose music was astonishing? Chopin, a staggering genius, wrote almost exclusively for the piano. And what do you do with opera? Is that a separate thing entirely?

Do you break music down by the elements and analyze, for example, who was the greatest master of counterpoint? The most inventive rhythmically? And then, of course, there is my personal take on things, which will, of course, factor in strongly but not be determinative.

Anyway, between talking with Mohammed and going through the annual “best of the year” ritual, I have been emboldened. So here begins an open deliberation leading eventually — in later articles, online videos and posts on ArtsBeat (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com) — to my answer to this irresistible question: Who are the 10 greatest composers in history? My editors urged that if I went down this path, I should go all the way and rank the Top 10 in order. But first I have to narrow the scope, so here are the ground rules:

I am focusing on Western classical music. There are compelling arguments against honoring this classification. Still, giants like George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Stephen Sondheim are outside my purview here. And on the assumption that we are too close to living composers to assess their place and their impact, I am eliminating them from consideration.

Finally, I am focusing on the eras since the late Baroque. You could make a good case for Josquin or Monteverdi, but I won’t. The traditions and styles were so different back then as to have been almost another art form. I’m looking roughly at the era an undergraduate survey of Western civilization might define as modern history.

So to get things going, let’s start with an easy one: Bach. He would probably be the consensus choice among thinking musicians for the top spot. But why?

Bach came at an intersection in music history. He was born in 1685, when the Baroque period was thriving yet vestiges of the Renaissance age of polyphonic music were lingering. By the time he died in 1750, opera, for which he had no interest, was a century and a half old, music was getting hipper, and elegantly decorous styles like the Rococo were widespread. Even some of Bach’s sons, who revered their father, thought he was a little old-fashioned as a composer. Bach did not care how he was perceived. He was too busy being a working musician, a composer who wrote pieces to order for whatever his job at the time, whether in a church or a court, demanded.

Bach stood right in the middle of this historical crossroads. His music is an astonishing synthesis of what had been and what was coming. Elements of the high polyphonic tradition run through his work. Yet the era of simpler Baroque textures and clear, strong tonal harmony had arrived.

In just the collected Bach chorales — the four-part, hymnlike settings of church tunes that crop up in his oratorios and cantatas — he codified everything that was known about harmony and anticipated the future, including wayward chromatic harmony à la Wagner. In the opening measures of the chorale “Es Ist Genug,” the one Berg incorporated into his final work, the Violin Concerto, Bach even anticipates atonality.

The 48 preludes and fugues of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” are the ultimate exploration of counterpoint in all its complexities, yet also a dazzling collection of quirky, sublime and sometimes showy character pieces.

What composer before or after Bach could have written the opening Kyrie of the Mass in B minor? It begins with choral cries of “Lord have mercy” (“Kyrie eleison”) as harmonically wrenching as anything in Brahms or Mahler. Then, with transfixing calm, the winding Kyrie theme is heard in the orchestra over a steady tread of a bass, as the inner voices build up. One by one the sections of the chorus enter, until Bach has constructed an intricate web of counterpoint at once intimidating in its complexity and consolingly beautiful.

Another candidate for this list was also born in Germany the same year as Bach: Handel, who lived nine years longer. Whereas Bach came from generations of musicians and was expected to go into the family business, Handel’s father was a barber and surgeon with aristocratic clientele who was determined to see his son become a lawyer and discouraged his studies of music. But Handel’s talent could not be denied.

After receiving thorough musical training in Germany, Handel learned the ways of Italian opera in Italy. In one of the curious twists in music history, he wound up living in London and writing Italian operas for English-speaking audiences who were wild about this exotic art form. Handel was a masterly composer in this genre and a savvy businessman who eventually became an opera-house manager and made more money than Bach ever could have imagined. When tastes shifted and box-office receipts dwindled, Handel found a new career as a revered purveyor of oratorios in English.

Thanks largely to the early-music movement Handel’s operas, which had mostly lapsed into obscurity, have been rediscovered and championed by formidable conductors, directors and singers. They are now rightly seen as psychologically astute and musically rich. Handel’s instrumental and large-scale choral works were well known to Mozart and Beethoven, who admired Handel tremendously.

Still, at least in the operas, Handel mostly hewed to convention. In less-than-inspired performances, the operas can come across as pro-forma works, with dialogue in recitative to advance the stories and set up the inevitable strings of da capo arias (structured with a Part A, a contrasting Part B and an embellished return of Part A). I prefer the operas in which Handel took more risks, as in the astonishing “Orlando,” which has as wrenching a portrait of a man’s descent into madness as you will find in any art form of any era.

Handel is a giant. A music theory teacher looking for a perfect example of three-part contrapuntal writing, with basso continuo, can do no better than to show students the main allegro section of the instrumental sinfonia that begins “Messiah.”

Still, does Handel make the cut for the Top 10? I don’t know. I think he should pay a price for churning out all those da capo arias.

Including Bach is a no-brainer. But remember, the point is to come up with a list. Move ahead a bit in history, and we are in danger of having four places among the Top 10 given to composers who worked in Vienna during a period of roughly 75 years, from 1750 to 1825. What was going on in that town at that time to foster such awesome creativity?

Let’s see.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 9, 2011


A cover article this weekend about choosing the Top 10 classical composers misstates, at one point, the length of time that opera had existed as of 1750, when Bach died. As the article correctly conveys in other references, opera had been around for roughly 150 years then, not “a half-century.”

Getting to Know Schumann Again, With Some Favorites By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, ALLAN KOZINN, VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, and STEVE SMITH

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December 16, 2010
Getting to Know Schumann Again, With Some Favorites By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, ALLAN KOZINN, VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, and STEVE SMITH
As the Schumann bicentennial year winds down, the classical music critics of The New York Times would like to share their latest thoughts about Schumann recordings. Some of their opinions have changed, others not, since their last survey of the field in 2004.

Here are Times critics’ favorite Schumann CDs. Given the volatility and uncertainties of the classical record market, some of these CDs may be out of print or may be found under different record numbers, and may require searching in specialty shops or through online sources, where some are available for purchase or downloading.

Anthony Tommasini

‘HUMORESKE,’ ‘FANTASIESTÜCKE,’ ‘NOVELLETTEN’ Sviatoslav Richter, pianist (Melodiya 74321 29464 2; CD).

‘DAVIDSBÜNDLERTÄNZE,’ ‘FANTASIESTÜCKE’ Murray Perahia, pianist (Sony Classical SK 92616; CD).

PIANO SONATA NO. 1, ‘KREISLERIANA’ Murray Perahia, pianist (Sony Classical SK 62786; CD).

PIANO CONCERTO Leif Ove Andsnes, pianist; Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Mariss Jansons (with Grieg’s Piano Concerto; EMI Classics 5 57562 2; CD).

SYMPHONIES NOS. 1-4, ‘MANFRED’ OVERTURE New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classical SMK 47611/2; two separate CDs).

SCHUMANN, a devoted disciple of Bach, was nearly obsessed with mastering techniques of counterpoint. And he lived in awe of Beethoven, who established the model of the symphonic ideal that intimidated so many composers in his wake. Yet Schumann was also the ultimate Romantic, with a phantasmagoric and childlike imagination.

Schumann best reconciled these seemingly disparate aesthetic stands in his remarkable piano works. Among his most astonishing, and most overlooked, piano works is the “Humoreske.” As its fanciful title suggests, this multimovement suite abounds in wistful reveries, mock-heroic marches and coyly charming melodic flights. Yet just below the surface the music teems with rigorous contrapuntal writing and wandering chromatic harmonies.

Sviatoslav Richter’s 1956 recording may be a little hard-driving, punchy and wild for some tastes. I find it thrilling. And Richter does things here — bringing out inner voices, articulating rippling passagework with uncanny clarity — that would seem impossible.

Murray Perahia’s beautiful 1973 recording of Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze” and “Fantasiestücke” helped bring him to attention. I loved it when it was released and still do. He tends to let the fantastical content of Schumann’s style take care of itself. Instead he simply lays out the scores with devotion, poetic sensitivity, scrupulous musicianship and pristine technique. Especially glorious is Mr. Perahia’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” Schumann’s suite of dancelike pieces celebrating an imaginary band of musicians rallying to counter the philistines who indulged in virtuosic display.

I cannot help placing another of Mr. Perahia’s Schumann recordings among my choices: his 1997 release offering definitive accounts of “Kreisleriana,” another Schumann work that hauntingly combines fervid imagination with intellectual mettle, and the Sonata No. 1 in F sharp minor. Schumann struggles in the sonata to channel his fancy into the formal sonata structure. Mr. Perahia plays the piece with such honesty and vigor that it comes across as fully formed and stunning.

Schumann’s Piano Concerto is heard so often that its originality can be taken for granted. The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes makes it sound startlingly fresh in his live 2002 recording with Mariss Jansons conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. In the CD notes Mr. Andsnes describes the concerto as “emotionally very complex — at times even schizophrenic.” This performance brings out those qualities while dispatching the music with unfailing integrity. (And it is coupled with a magnificent account of the Grieg concerto.)

I grew up with Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of the Schumann symphonies with the New York Philharmonic from 1960 (available on two individual CDs). The original album cover emphasized that Bernstein was using Schumann’s original orchestrations, which many conductors and scholars considered awkward. In these performances Bernstein was out to prove that Schumann knew what he was doing, if you have a conductor in charge who trusts the scores and strives to get the balances right.

Years later Bernstein recorded these symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, magisterially. I still prefer these earlier versions with the New York Philharmonic, where his feisty enthusiasm comes through so directly.

Allan Kozinn

‘CARNAVAL,’ ‘FANTASIESTüCKE,’ OTHER WORKS Arthur Rubinstein, pianist (RCA 63051; CD).

PIANO SONATA NO. 1, FANTASY IN C Leif Ove Andsnes, pianist (EMI Classics 56414; CD).

PIANO CONCERTO, KONZERTSTüCKE (OPP. 92, 134) Murray Perahia, pianist; Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abbado (Sony Classical SK 64577; CD).

CELLO CONCERTO, OTHER WORKS Mischa Maisky, cellist; Martha Argerich, pianist; Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon 289 460 524; CD).

‘DICHTERLIEBE,’ ‘LIEDERKREIS’ (OP. 24), OTHER SONGS Ian Bostridge, tenor; Julius Drake, pianist (EMI Classics 56575; CD).

I HAVE always had mixed feelings about Schumann. Most of his larger works strike me as structurally unwieldy and often uninteresting, as if the eccentricities that turned into madness at the end of his life had kept him from focusing on formal logic and other seemingly necessary technical details. Yet certain of Schumann’s medium-size works, like the Piano Concerto and the Cello Concerto, are engaging and full of personality. And you have to believe that the very quirkiness that led him astray elsewhere was actually the key to his originality (and durability) in more compact works, and in scores like “Carnaval,” a grand pianistic panorama built of picturesque, richly characterized short movements.

Rubinstein made two superb but very different recordings of “Carnaval,” each with irresistible points: normally I prefer the energy and temperament that drive his 1953 mono recording. But the version listed, from the early 1960s, is more seasoned and judicious. Schumann’s odd sensibility still comes through, but here Rubinstein’s interpretation is more ruminative and relaxed, and the piano sound in this stereo recording is richer. Also included are colorful accounts of the “Fantasiestücke” and the marvelously weird “Prophet Bird.”

The main attraction of Leif Ove Andsnes’s energetic recital is the Opus 17 Fantasy, composed as part of a plan to raise money for a Beethoven monument, and its allusions to Beethoven’s “An die Ferne Geliebte” and Seventh Symphony make it a monument in its own right. Mr. Andsnes gives the three-movement work a powerful, focused performance, and does the same for the theme-rich but diffuse Sonata No. 1.

Murray Perahia, in his 1994 recording of the Piano Concerto, strikes a fine balance between the tensions and anxieties that seem always to be at the boiling point in Schumann and the lyricism that keeps his best music from going off the deep end. Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic follow Mr. Perahia’s interpretive impulses closely, not only in the concerto but also in the less frequently heard fillers, the Introduction and Allegro Appassionato and the stormy Introduction and Allegro Concertante.

The obvious first choice for a Schumann Cello Concerto recording is Rostropovich’s, but sometimes it’s worth looking beyond the obvious, particularly if you are seeking a disc that puts the concerto in the context of Schumann’s other cello music instead of pairing it with concertos by other composers. Mischa Maisky produces a rich sound in his cogent, forceful reading of the concerto and shows the lively give-and-take between cello and piano in several chamber pieces, with Martha Argerich supplying characterful accounts of the piano lines.

Schumann’s songs rival Schubert’s in their ability to summon, concisely, a fully realized emotional world. Ian Bostridge offers sensitive, shapely performances of the great cycles, “Liederkreis” and “Dichterliebe,” using a varied tonal palette that occasionally, and briefly, toes the line between speech and song when an almost spoken sound seems more confiding. A handful of miscellaneous songs is included as well, among them the haunting, dramatic “Belsatzar.”

Vivien Schweitzer

‘CARNAVAL,’ ‘KREISLERIANA’ Mitsuko Uchida, pianist (Decca 475 8260; CD).

‘KINDERSZENEN,’ ‘HUMORESQUE,’ ‘KREISLERIANA’ Radu Lupu, pianist (Decca B00000422M; CD).

PIANO CONCERTO Dinu Lipatti, pianist; Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan (with Mozart’s Concerto No. 21; EMI Classics B000063UN6; CD).

VIOLIN SONATAS NOS. 1-3 Jennifer Koh, violinist; Reiko Uchida, pianist (Cedille 90000 095; CD).

‘DICHTERLIEBE,’ OTHER HEINE SETTINGS Gerald Finley, bass-baritone; Julius Drake, pianist (Hyperion B001CJYJRS; CD).

SCHUMANN, the son of a bookseller, began composing just as significant advances were being made in the development of the upright piano. He wrote mainly keyboard music during the early part of his career, incorporating prominent literary and autobiographical allusions in many of his works for solo piano, like “Carnaval” and “Kreisleriana.”

Mitsuko Uchida offers noteworthy interpretations of both works. She creates vivid characterizations in the 29 movements of “Carnaval,” with colorful portraits of the dreamy Eusebius and the volatile Florestan (Schumann’s alter egos).

The ever-probing Radu Lupu also offers a distinguished rendition of “Kreisleriana.” The disc includes an evocative performance of “Humoreske,” whose opening section he plays with yearning refinement. The highlight of the recording is Mr. Lupu’s magical performance of “Kinderszenen,” which unsentimentally evokes the whimsy and imagination of Schumann’s beloved work. “Träumerei” (“Reverie”) and “Der Dichter Spricht” (“The Poet Speaks”) are particularly lovely.

Another legendary Schumann interpreter was the great Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti, who died of Hodgkin’s disease at 33, in 1950. One of his signature pieces was Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, which can be heard on a recording made shortly before Lipatti’s death with Herbert von Karajan and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. Still a benchmark, the interpretation is rarely rivaled for its elegance, depth and poetry.

In Schumann’s catalog of chamber works, his three sonatas for violin and piano are not performed as often as his popular Piano Quintet or “Fantasiestücke.” With sensitive musicianship, the violinist Jennifer Koh and the pianist Reiko Uchida illuminate the charm and depth of these three works, in which the two instruments have an equal role. Particularly impressive is their performance of the Sonata No. 2 in D minor, a key that for Schumann (as for Mozart) had a particular significance, implying emotional turbulence.

Schumann also made significant contributions to the vocal repertory, particularly in 1840, when he wrote more than 150 songs. That year his “Dichterliebe” (“The Poet’s Love”), set to texts from Heinrich Heine’s “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” was published.

Amid stiff competition, the bass-baritone Gerald Finley and the pianist Julius Drake offer a standout recording of Schumann songs, including the “Dichterliebe” cycle. Mr. Finley’s beautiful, mellifluous voice is attuned to every textural nuance and mood, his singing often introspective and reflective rather than overtly emotional, although in songs like “Belsatzar” there is plenty of simmering tension. Throughout the disc, Mr. Finley’s interpretations offer communicative artistry of the highest level.

Steve Smith

SYMPHONIES NOS. 1-4, OVERTURE, SCHERZO AND FINALE Staatskapelle Dresden, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (EMI Classics 5 67771 2; two CDs).

PIANO CONCERTO; PIANO QUINTET Rudolf Serkin, pianist; Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy; Budapest Quartet (CBS Great Performances MK 37256; CD).

PIANO WORKS Wilhelm Kempff, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon 471 312-2; four CDs).

‘DICHTERLIEBE’ Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Hubert Giesen, pianist (with songs by Beethoven and Schubert; Deutsche Grammophon 449 747-2; CD).

‘MYRTHEN,’ DUETS Dorothea Röschmann, soprano; Ian Bostridge, tenor; Graham Johnson, pianist (Hyperion CDJ33107; CD).

SCHUMANN’S four completed symphonies have long been maligned for awkward orchestration and more besides, yet in the right hands they easily assert their place in the standard repertory for their noble themes and vibrantly conjured moods. Two of the surest hands are those of Wolfgang Sawallisch, whose 1971 EMI recording with the Staatskapelle Dresden is both the most convincing traversal by any one conductor and among Mr. Sawallisch’s crowning achievements on record.

Reissued in 2001, the set is filled with memorable touches: a majestic opening to the “Spring” Symphony, a crackling scherzo in the Second, blazing grandeur in the first movement of the “Rhenish” and brilliant characterization throughout the Fourth. Even the underrated Overture, Scherzo and Finale, a near-symphony from 1841, gets its due. In 2003 Mr. Sawallisch released a second set of Schumann symphonies, recorded live with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Those versions are still available as downloads, but the brio of Mr. Sawallisch’s Dresden cycle makes it a clear first choice.

Schumann’s popular Piano Concerto in A minor hardly lacks for excellent recordings; whether you prefer brain, brawn or Romantic effusiveness, you can find an account to suit your taste. Rudolf Serkin’s 1964 CBS recording has stood the test of time, both for the lucidity of his playing and for ravishing accompaniment by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. A CBS Great Performances album that also includes Serkin’s authoritative 1963 rendition of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat, with the Budapest Quartet, is available for download from a variety of sources and on made-to-order CD from ArkivMusic.com.

In solo piano works like “Davidsbündlertänze,” “Kinderszenen” and “Kreisleriana,” Schumann juggles characters, scenes and moods with the passions of a poet and the reflexes of a seasoned dramatist. Again, the recorded catalog offers playing for every temperament. Yet few pianists approach the totality of Schumann’s expression with the sobriety and taste shown in a four-CD collection of recordings Wilhelm Kempff made for Deutsche Grammophon during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Now and again Kempff’s technique falls short for an instant, but his insight and grace never falter.

Among Schumann’s extraordinary outpouring of songs during the 1840s, the cycle “Dichterliebe” stands as a peak of emotional efficacy and compositional ingenuity. The stormy passions in these 16 Heine settings seem to invite darker voices. Yet Heine was 25 when he published his “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” from which the “Dichterliebe” poems were chosen, and Schumann was 30 when he set them. The tenor Fritz Wunderlich, 35 when he recorded the work for Deutsche Grammophon in 1965 (less than a year before his tragically early death), sang with a supernal sweetness and crystalline clarity that made his account one for the ages.

The soprano Dorothea Röschmann and the tenor Ian Bostridge bring a similarly winsome quality to their shared account of Schumann’s “Myrthen,” a collection from 1840, and combine deliciously in two sets of duets (Opp. 34 and 78) in the seventh volume of a series devoted to Schumann’s complete songs from the Hyperion label. Purchase the album by itself or choose a boxed set of the entire series; whatever you do, don’t miss this disc.

Top 10 Classical Albums Of 2010 by TOM HUIZENGA

Deceptive Cadence
Top 10 Classical Albums Of 2010 by TOM HUIZENGA
Top 10 Classical Records of 2010
This was a
particularly fine
year for fans of
singing, which
would explain why
half of the list
below features
vocal music.
We had at least two promising debut CDs. Early in the year,
soprano Sondra Radvanovsky released her all-Verdi disc,
proving that she could soon become a top contender in the
lyrico-spinto repertoire, very much in the Renata Tebaldi
mold. And in October, the exciting Italian tenor Vittorio
Grigolo's debut disc gives hope to all who patiently wait for the
next Pavarotti. He's got that Pavarotti "ping" in his voice.
It was also a good year for indie-classical, and especially New
Amsterdam Records. The enterprising alt-classical label
released several pleasing discs by young composer-performers
who adroitly straddle the post-rock and classical genres.
But perhaps the most surprising release for me was Alexander Melnikov's two-disc
traversal of the Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich. His recording
lifted a veil from these sometimes misunderstood, underplayed works. Melnikov's
combination of intelligence, insight and amazing fingers pushes this album straight
to the top.
The Best Music Of
2010: Complete
Coverage
Enlarge
1. Shostakovich, 'The Preludes And Fugues, Op. 87'
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Artist: Alexander Melnikov
Song: Prelude And Fugue In A Major
It's funny how the right musician can illuminate a piece and suddenly, like
flipping on a light switch, everything becomes visible. For decades, pianist
Tatiana Nikolaeva's recordings of Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87
were considered the benchmark. But Alexander Melnikov has changed all that:
His brilliant new recording liberates all of the poetry, ferocity and mysticism in
these pieces, many of which sound far from the composer's twitchy, sardonic
style. He paints the 7th Prelude and Fugue with open-air simplicity and
watercolor freshness. Shostakovich pushed J.S. Bach's sturdy prelude and
fugue formula to new heights, and Melnikov has pushed that into the light.
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Song: Il Trovatore: D'amor sull' ali rosee
Hearing an incredible new voice for the first time in concert is a particular thrill
for me. Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky at the Kennedy Center this spring was a
blow-away moment. Just after that, she released an extraordinary all-Verdi CD.
Radvanovsky opens her mouth and huge streams of sound soar like giant bolts
of multicolored fabric -- shimmering silver, azure blue. These days, very few
sopranos have what Radvanovsky has in her voice: generous size and weight,
dramatic intensity, dynamic control and coloring. It's a combination essential for
singing Verdi's greatest soprano roles. If Radvanovsky continues at this level,
we'll have a major new star on our hands.
2. Sondra Radvanovsky, 'Verdi Arias'
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Artist: Berlin Philharmonic
Song: Tevot, For Orchestra (excerpt)
Thomas Ades is a triple threat. Not yet 40, the London-born musician is a
conductor, pianist and, few would deny, one of our greatest living composers.
Tevot, scored for an oversized orchestra, is a work of art that pulls you into its
vortex, beginning with twinkling filaments of strings and gradually building to
hulking, twisted dances, careening winds and crushing percussion. Midway
through, we find ourselves floating -- Ades compares it to a journey through the
chaos of outer space -- which finally gives way to a gorgeous, Richard
Straussian repose. You can't excerpt this 22-minute piece. You need to hop on
for the full, astounding ride.
3. Thomas Ades, 'Tevot, etc.'
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Song: Torna ai felici di' (from 'Le Villi')
Anticipating the next Pavarotti or Domingo has become something of a tiresome
pastime for opera fanatics. Hopes were high for the incredible Rolando Villazon,
but he has all but burned himself out. Now, another strong ray of hope has
appeared: Vittorio Grigolo. Not only is his new CD, The Italian Tenor, a stunning
debut, but I've also seen him on stage twice and, believe me, he's the real deal.
With a good amount of the Pavarotti "ping," Grigolo's voice is awash in Italian
4. Vittorio Grigolo, 'The Italian Tenor'
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sunshine, and, if he guards his vocal resources carefully, he may just be our
next super-tenor.
Song: Laulusild, for chorus
Baltic Runes, another rock-solid collaboration (the 11th) between director Paul
Hillier and the virtuosic Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, jubilantly
underscores the innovation found in choral writing from greater Scandinavia,
where singing traditions are much stronger than they are here. For example,
take the fascinating style from Lapland called yoik. It's really more of a verb --
you "yoik" someone by creating his or her essence in a mélange of yelping and
swooping. Veljo Tormis, Estonia's preeminent living composer, is justly wellrepresented
on this fascinating disc. His luminous Laulusild (Bridge of Song)
builds on a foundation of soft male voices until the entire chorus, in full cry,
swirls in interlocking parts.
5. Baltic Runes, 'Estonian Philharmonic Chamber
Choir'
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Song: I Am Coming For My Things
Classical music is thriving these days, thanks in part to young, smart musicians
like Missy Mazzoli, who feels equally comfortable playing clubs and concert
halls. Mazzoli is the composer, keyboardist and bandleader of the all-female,
Brooklyn-based quintet Victoire. Along with violin, clarinet, bass and keyboards,
Mazzoli confidently weaves in electronics, vocals and found sound to create a
fresh, sometimes quirky sound that you might call alt-chamber music. "I Am
Coming for My Things" is a hazy dreamscape composed with dashes of straightahead
chamber music, minimalism and rock.
6. Victoire, 'Cathedral City'
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Song: D'Amor al dolce impero (from Armida)
Joyce DiDonato calls herself the "Yankee Diva" on her blog. It's a testament to
her down-home, girl-next-door nature. But there's nothing ordinary or common
about her singing. This mezzo-soprano is one of today's most exciting opera
singers; she's at the top of her game right now and in demand around the world.
Gramophone magazine just named her Artist of the Year. With her naturalsounding
instrument of cream and brushed silver, listen to what she can do with
a single word, like "feconde" at 2:18 into this aria from Rossini's Armida. This all-
Rossini disc is the second killer arias record from DiDonato, following last year's
excellent all-Handel disc.
7. Joyce DiDonato, 'Colbran, The Muse'
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Song: Sonata In C Minor: I. Allegro
I suppose it’s possible that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote a dull piece of
music, but I've not encountered it. He was the second of J.S. Bach's four
8. Danny Driver, 'C.P.E. Bach: Keyboard Sonatas'
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musical sons, and, for me, by far the most interesting. C.P.E.'s music always
sounds fresh and propulsive, often with something loopy thrown in. Listen to the
odd key changes, jerky stops and starts and wide swings of loud and soft in this
sonata, played with elegant wit by British pianist Danny Driver. These so-called
quirks would later become standard practice for composers such as Mozart,
Haydn and later Beethoven.
This album is available from Hyperion Records' site..
Song: The Creed
Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov occasionally gets bundled, along with
Arvo Part, John Tavener and Henryk Gorecki, into the pigeon hole loosely called
the "god squad" -- composers who produce quantities of evocative, sacred
choral music. Silvestrov has a special bag of hauntingly beautiful vocal tricks.
Listen to the glowing halos of sound (produced by the excellent Kiev Chamber
Choir) that hover over the music, shimmering like moonlight on black water.
Never mind that these are liturgical songs -- the CD provides no texts -- and just
bask in their trembling aura.
9. Valentin Silvestrov, 'Sacred Works'
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Artist: Bang On A Can
Song: 2x5: III. Fast
Steve Reich may be labeled a "minimalist" composer, but the works on this
recording are far more "maximal" than simple repeating chords and mutating
melodies. This disc presents two recent Reich works featuring groups of
musicians playing "against" taped versions of themselves. Double Sextet -- for
strings, winds, keyboard and percussion -- won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. In the
more recent work, 2x5, Reich said he wanted to write for rock instruments
(electric bass, piano, drums, guitar), and was especially keen on interlocking the
electric bass parts. The sparkling result is something like a cross between a
1970s prog-rock band (King Crimson, for example) and Reich's own brand of
minimalism.
10. Steve Reich, 'Double Sextet, 2x5'
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Top 10 Classical Albums Of 2010 : Deceptive Cadence : NPR Page 4 of 6
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NPR Listener (21stCenturyMusicFan) wrote:
Sunday, December 19, 2010 10:53:52 AM
KoKo Paterson (The_Talking_Ape) wrote:
Saturday, December 18, 2010 12:05:46 AM
Leandro Martins (Alchemist2012) wrote:
Wednesday, December 15, 2010 11:26:49 PM
David Calechman (Spikeg) wrote:
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 1:13:03 PM
Bobi Rinehart (BRinehart) wrote:
Tuesday, December 07, 2010 7:39:07 PM
Soyeon Hwang (Soyeonia) wrote:
Sunday, December 05, 2010 9:00:57 AM
Ronald Nolan (funster12) wrote:
Wednesday, December 01, 2010 11:10:07 PM
Matthew Owen (Mysterio) wrote:
Recent First
I do not see any big deal about having two discs from the Harmonia Mundi label on this list--
great music is great music.
I certainly cannot wait to hear Danny Driver's take on CPE Bach (Pletnev's set was very
riveting), and hope to eventually get around to hearing Alexander Melnikov's version of the
Preludes and Fugues.
Concerning the Reich--I was deeply disappointed that lack of rehearsal time caused Eighth
Blackbird to have to cancel the performance of the Double Sextet while they were here in
Dallas. The 2x5 reference to King Crimson is not entirely accurate. They are known as a "70s"
band, but the first recording that integrated Steve Reich's influence (Discipline) was recorded
and released in 1981. It was great to hear that Reich (likely unintentially) returned the favor.
Recommend (0)
In the Victoire bit, the violinist and clarinetist both let their pitch go flat at various times,
obviously intentionally. Why do they do that? It is irritating.
Recommend (0)
Maybe we are just stocked on the past while great composers are composing and no one is
listening, until perhaps 200 years from now...
Recommend (0)
Let's hear it for vocal music! Given your impeccable taste I'm going to seek out these
recordings. I do need some variety, even I can't live on Afro-Cuban music alone.
Recommend (0)
Granted there are some great selections listed here but where is Zuill Bailey's Bach Cello
Suites (2010). That is number one on my list!
Recommend (0)
Thank you so much for these fantastic selectioin, Top 10 Classical albums of 2010. I wanna
share them to my facebook friends. Happy Holidays!
Recommend (0)
Great selection, and fun to learn about the new artists. Happy Holidays!
Recommend (1)
A fantastic selection, covering a wide range of styles and approaches. The Melnikov disc
totally deserves the top slot, and Danny Driver's CPE Bach is positively electric. I too miss the
Higdon Concerto disc (Hahn's best so far), but the Ades disc is possibly more'current.' Well
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Top 10 Classical Albums Of 2010 : Deceptive Cadence : NPR Page 5 of 6
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Wednesday, December 01, 2010 9:16:54 PM
Charlie Haid (CharlieHaid) wrote:
Wednesday, December 01, 2010 8:57:04 PM
W Berger (Wberger) wrote:
Wednesday, December 01, 2010 1:13:17 PM
done as usual, NPR - and thanks for your steadfast support of classical music.
Recommend (1)
Great choice of Classic Albums. The H Mundi people must be very proud and happy. Your
relationship with them enhances it all!
Recommend (0)
No Higdon Concertos?
Recommend (6)
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