Your Top 5 Composers

[Brian]

For Rameau, are you more of an opera guy?

The booklet quotes Debussy speaking highly of Rameau as a revolutionary. I can find the quotes tomorrow morning and post some.

[Peter Power Pop]

For Rameau, are you more of an opera guy?

The booklet quotes Debussy speaking highly of Rameau as a revolutionary. I can find the quotes tomorrow morning and post some.

My introduction to Rameau was the suites from the operas (see below), and from there I moved on to the operas. I love all of it. The music of Rameau speaks to me in a way that no other composer does. His keyboard and chamber works don't speak to me in quite the same way. I like them, but they don't have the effect on me that his fully orchestrated (and vocal) stuff does.

As for Debussy, he wrote Hommage à Rameau which is from Images Book I:

This was the very first piece of music I heard of Rameau:

I was hooked from the start.

[Brian]

For me the magic of Rameau is you never know what he's going to do next. In common reputation maybe, "baroque" has this reputation as predictable, neat, formal music that tick-tocks along, but Rameau has so many cool, wild ideas. Biber is like that too.

My introduction to Rameau was the suites from the operas (see below), and from there I moved on to the operas. I love all of it. The music of Rameau speaks to me in a way that no other composer does. His keyboard and chamber works don't speak to me in quite the same way. I like them, but they don't have the effect on me that his fully orchestrated (and vocal) stuff does.

As for Debussy, he wrote Hommage à Rameau which is from Images Book I:

Olafsson saves that for the very end, as the last track on his album. Here's what he writes in the booklet about pairing the two composers:

"Debussy had been swept away by a performance of the first two acts of Rameau's opera Castor et Pollux [in 1903]. In his superlative review, he described the music as "so personal in tone, so new in construction, that space and time are defeated and Rameau seems to be contemporary." Curiously, the more time I spent with Rameau's keyboard music, the more my mind wandered to Debussy and the seemingly unlikely affinity of that revolutionary, who openly disregarded tradition and denounced all musical rules except the law of pleasure, to the founding father of French musical theory and pedagogy. Upon closer inspection, I found that being a revolutionary is one of the very things the two had in common. Despite very different historical circumstances, both possessed a rare kind of relentless intellectual independence.

"Another shared element...is what could be called a synaesthetic streak. In my view, a certain blending of sensory experience seems natural to how the two approached music. Debussy famously surrounded himself with poets and painters, drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources. Dubbed the "Newton of Harmony", Rameau had a certain scientific interest in the colours of sounds as well as in light, but also a remarkable originality in what we call the colours of orchestration....Both composers wrote music which engages more senses than just hearing. And both enjoyed giving their compositions titles that stimulate the imagination."

Anyway, the proof is (or isn't) in the listening!

[kyjo]

Must listen to more Tabakov!

Only if you want to develop depression and anger issues...

[foxandpeng]

Only if you want to develop depression and anger issues...

Or address them 😁

[Owen David]

Beethoven
Tchaikovsky
Sibelius
Puccini
Satie

Clearly this might change tommorow!

[Owen David]

Beethoven
Tchaikovsky
Sibelius
Puccini
Satie

Clearly this might change tommorow!

[Keemun]

Bach
Beethoven
Bruckner
Sibelius
Tchaikovsky

In alphabetical order.   

[Cato]

Oy!  This is just too impossible, although I think - because of my (apparently genetic    ) affinity for them, my top 3 will always be Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg...

Never to be forgotten: Karl Amadeus Hartmann, a quasi-Salvador Dali of Music, creating fantastic and even nightmarish soundscapes of The Id.

But then come all kinds of others, especially Russian composers: Scriabin, S. Taneyev, Nikolai and Alexander Tcherepnin, Prokofiev and Sergei Protopopov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov,...

Certainly Beethoven and Charles Ives could rotate into the top 5!

And also never to be forgotten: our creator of Kammeredelsteine and other wonderful works for chorus and for orchestras: Karl Henning!

e.g.