Composers of whose music one CD is enough

[orbital]

Maybe double-check which symphonies you do have - his 4th and 6th are his most dramatic. The 4th keeps surprising me that it came from the same pen as the guy who wrote the docile 3rd and 5th, and the 6th is a model of drama in music... I love the more friendly sounding works too, though.

Well Lethe, what do you know  :-[Turns out I have 3 and 5 (and not 4 and 6) Adrian Boult on EMI. Actually it says A Pastoral Symphony, I guess that is the third. Maybe I should investigate others, but with those 2 I have and the fantasias I felt I had no reason to.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to get that CD off the rack where it had been collecting dust for over a year 

Ah but that's not true. With jazz, the art is being created live.  But anyway many composers revise their works after performing them.  Just as we respond and adjust to the music we hear, so do composers respond and adjust to the reaction of the audience.  To use a physics example, even the sun moves in response to the planets, even if only a little.

Listening to new music might change our aesthetic, but it might not.  Certainly we shouldn't feel that it's an obligation to change our perception every time we hear music that was new to us.  It certainly we should expect that composers do care what their audience thinks and reacts to us reacting.  I still just don't see it as one sided.

It is not one sided perhaps, but it is very deeply tilted towards one side. Most of the composers I listen to have been dead for a while and their music is here to stay as it is whereas I am changing all the time (not as radically as I would like to, but still). Please don't get me wrong, I don't mean to say that our aesthetic sensibilities are inferior, but we as the people who experience rather than create are more apt to adapt.
If I am a person who loves music, and a certain composer happens to be recognized as a great composer of music, the only reason that I don't listen to him can be because I don't see his point of view. This is not a fault, but it is something that can be corrected adjusted in the future -by me.

[Mark]

Funny how views differ: I hear a lot of hidden anger beneath bleakness in the 3rd, rather than docility!

You're not alone.

[karlhenning]

I don't know if anger is quite the right affect, but I completely agree that such docility as there may be, is but epidermis-deep.

[marvinbrown]

I am going to go out on a limb here and say MAHLER.  Yes the 2nd Symphony will suffice.

  marvin

[longears]

I am going to go out on a limb here and say MAHLER.  Yes the 2nd Symphony will suffice.

And some recordings do fit on just one CD.

[karlhenning]

And some recordings do fit on just one CD.

Get it over with! That's the spirit! 

[Ten thumbs]

Kuhlau's Overtures have satisfied my curiosity. I never knew that the first Lulu was a man!
As for Satie: '3 Pieces in the Shape of a Pear' is essential. Almost a desert island candidate.

[Bonehelm]

I am going to go out on a limb here and say MAHLER.  Yes the 2nd Symphony will suffice.

  marvin

......never! At least bring in the 8th, so you have 1000 people with you at the desert island!

[DavidW]

......never! At least bring in the 8th, so you have 1000 people with you at the desert island!

And then you won't go hungry for awhile because you can eat them.

Or you can have a long melodramatic story involving your plight to get off the island involving strange numbers, constant flashbacks to the past, and a black smoke that kills you.

[BachQ]

My upward limit of Carl Ruggles' music is two CD's ........

[marvinbrown]

......never! At least bring in the 8th, so you have 1000 people with you at the desert island!

  I never really liked the 8th symphony nor really understood it for that matter ...I get the impression that Mahler composed bits and pieces of different operas and pieced them haphazardly together in a jumbled mess and called it the 8th Symphony. No I think the 2nd Symphony will do on its own for my Mahler collection.  (Oh dear I'm going to get ripped apart for posting this..)

  marvin

[Bonehelm]

  I never really liked the 8th symphony nor really understood it for that matter ...I get the impression that Mahler composed bits and pieces of different operas and pieced them haphazardly together in a jumbled mess and called it the 8th Symphony. No I think the 2nd Symphony will do on its own for my Mahler collection.  (Oh dear I'm going to get ripped apart for posting this..)

  marvin

Mahler's 8th is well worth exploring and the amount of time, patience you need to put into it. If it doesn't click for you now, that means you're still musically immature. Come back later, you'll find better things.

[Larry Rinkel]

Mahler's 8th is well worth exploring and the amount of time, patience you need to put into it. If it doesn't click for you now, that means you're still musically immature. Come back later, you'll find better things.

Hmm. There are others to whom the same advice can be given. Actually the 8th is very tightly written, at least in terms of its recurring motifs, but I find it hard to relate to myself. Or should I say the second movement, as I very much like the first.

[Bonehelm]

Hmm. There are others to whom the same advice can be given. Actually the 8th is very tightly written, at least in terms of its recurring motifs, but I find it hard to relate to myself. Or should I say the second movement, as I very much like the first.

Well, if anyone could just get his music after 10 or so hearings, Mahler's music wouldn't be Mahler. It's complex, and it takes time to understand his works, especially the gargantuan 8th.

[max]

Almost every post testifies to the fact that it's not the composers problem. This is not to insult anyone's preferences because even composers have problems with other composers since the days of Mouret and Rameau.

[marvinbrown]

Mahler's 8th is well worth exploring and the amount of time, patience you need to put into it. If it doesn't click for you now, that means you're still musically immature. Come back later, you'll find better things.

  Not sure I agree with you regarding musical immaturity.  there are many peices that are more difficult to listen to than Mahler's 8th that I love and can relate to:  R. Strauss' Elektra and Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu being some of them. I suspect that the problem is simply that I do not like what I am listening to when I play Mahler's 8th, it just might be in this case the composer's problem, I hope I am wrong!

  marvin 

[brpaulandrew]

For me VW is one of them, Elgar is another (though both are double cd's if that makes a difference).

For RWV, also try Symphony No. 5 and then the Elgar Cello Concerto.

For my one disc only composer... Franz Liszt. To loosely quote the Austrian Emperor Joseph in Amadeus, "Too many notes."

[Florestan]

  I suspect that the problem is simply that I do not like what I am listening to when I play Mahler's 8th, it just might be in this case the composer's problem, I hope I am wrong!

  marvin 

But, Marvin, if you don't like the music, then obviously the "problem" is yours, not the composer's. And I wouldn't even call it a "problem". You don't like it, period. There's nothing wrong with not liking something.

[Tsaraslondon]

Duparc.

His songs (all masterpieces) fit easily onto one CD.

[Larry Rinkel]

Almost every post testifies to the fact that it's not the composers problem. This is not to insult anyone's preferences because even composers have problems with other composers since the days of Mouret and Rameau.

Depends on the composer, the work, and its reputation among informed musicians and listeners. A lot of people in my experience, even those who otherwise love Verdi, report problems with Falstaff. Incoherent, not melodic, not funny, and on and on it goes. I myself found the work utterly confusing on first hearing. And yet Falstaff has long been a work beloved by many musicians and listeners who take the time to truly know it well - to the point where some place Falstaff at the peak of Verdi's achievement. It was, for example, one of Stravinsky's favorites, Carter loves it, and it was the only Verdi opera recorded by Leonard Bernstein. Toscanini was known to rehearse brief passages for as long as an hour. So what to do? give up on Falstaff after one hearing because it isn't as immediately accessible as Il Trovatore, or stay with it in hopes that greater familiarity will get one to hear its very special qualities? The choice - as well as the gain or loss - is yours.