Favourite key-changes

[DaveF]

All,

I'm sure that somewhere in this forum there must be a discussion of key-changes, but I've looked and not found it so, with apologies if duplicating: being a lover of effective changes of key, I'd be most interested to hear where people's favourite ones occur.  A brief list of my own (so far), in no particular order, might be:

The shift from B to C sharp major at Sanctus in the Tibi omnes movement of the Berlioz Te Deum;
The gorgeously Tristan-like moment in the slow movement of Dvorak 7 (bar 70 and thereabouts);
The climactic appearance of the big chorale in the second movement of Mahler 5;
The move from holpen his servant Israel to as he promised in the Magnificat of Byrd's Great Service;
The several spine-tingling ones in the Pavane of the Sons of the Morning in Vaughan Williams's Job.

Looking forward to lots more...

DF

[Brian]

Almost everybody who's heard Havergal Brian's "Gothic" Symphony will want to mention the ending of its third movement, and rightly so!

[snyprrr]

How bout Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys... aye aye... up and down, up and down...

And Jackie Blue goes from G to E... Sky High goes from B-minor to B-major...

Then there's that lone Ab at the end of the first chorus of I Only Have Eyes for You... deeear....

[xochitl]

whatever that is at the very end of janacek's sinfonietta where the full brass section goes into a nose-dive.  just thinking about it gives me chills

train 1 from Einstein on the Beach: also at the very end when the instruments drop out and the voices do the massive tribal chant thing

sibelius 5th: when the swan theme switches from high to low register in the horns.  heavenly

prokofiev - alexander nevsky:  halfway thru the battle on the ice when the full chorus comes in and we get some weird chase music, then the whole thing turns on its head [i think this is where the ice opens]

mahler 7: 1st mvmt development when the harp glissandoes and the strings start soaring

the first interlude from peter grimes.  i love that upward woodwind figure that comes out of nowhere

[Rinaldo]

Oh, there's nothing like a surprise key change that sends chills down my spine! Most of my favourite pieces of music have one or more of those very strategically placed.

Case in point: the climax of RVW's Tallis Fantasia.

Or the buildup in Kabeláč's Mystery of Time, where it's like a shift in gears and you know there's a storm coming.

[Brian]

whatever that is at the very end of janacek's sinfonietta where the full brass section goes into a nose-dive.  just thinking about it gives me chills

sibelius 5th: when the swan theme switches from high to low register in the horns.  heavenly

prokofiev - alexander nevsky:  halfway thru the battle on the ice when the full chorus comes in and we get some weird chase music, then the whole thing turns on its head [i think this is where the ice opens]

Oh man I 100% agree with all of these, especially the Janacek. There's another great one with Janacek, in the original version of the Glagolitic Mass, halfway through "Svet."

[Cato]

Some of the most famous major/minor conflicts can be found in Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber in Act II, Scene 4, Die Wolfsschlucht (The Wolf's Glen).

[jochanaan]

Mozart, Symphony #40, first movement, beginning of the development: from Bb through a screaming turn to F# minor!
Tchaikovsky, Symphony #6, about halfway through, the music fades in D major (at pppppp!) and then explodes into C minor.
My long-time favorite, Bruckner, Symphony #7, last movement, just before the end: several seemingly unrelated 7th-chords and a convention-defying leap from C# major right back to the tonic E major.
And how can we forget the change from C to E in Ravel's Bolero?