What are you listening to?

[Diapason]

Indeed, and fashions definitely change. Remember when the Irish Times produced their commemorative reprint of the first edition (or whatever it was) a couple of years back? One interesting thing in that was an ad a for music shop selling sheet music. It was not dissimilar to an ad for "new singles from x and y and z" but here they were advertising new works from a variety of randomers I'd never heard of, and Chopin. There was no indication that the Chopin piece was to be considered in any way more desirable than the others. It was just one of the latest pieces that people were playing.

There is, of course, a tremendous amount of conservatism among the classical concert-going public, and I can certainly understand why. It's a costly business going to orchestral concerts, and if I'm paying up I want to be treated to the good stuff. But one of the marvellous things about CDs is that the business in recent years has been able to branch out and offer top-drawer recordings from lesser-known composers. Hyperion have championed this, as have many other labels. It's really a great time to be a classical music buyer.

[jaybee]

I have a number of the CDs in that series and I have always enjoyed them. I think that the Sacred Music of Vivaldi is still underrated.

I'd rate the Stabat Mater as one of the finest pieces of choral music ever written....

This disc gets a spin most Saturday mornings....!!!

[jaybee]

Has a similar thing happened with music...?? has JSB always been considered top notch since he started composing, or was he resurrected?

Absolutely not. JSB was completely forgotten and totally ignored until his music was publicly resurrected by Mendelssohn in 1829 when he conducted The St. Matthew Passion.

Interesting!! not far off the parallel "discoveries" in painting so....

[fergus]

Has a similar thing happened with music...?? has JSB always been considered top notch since he started composing, or was he resurrected?

Absolutely not. JSB was completely forgotten and totally ignored until his music was publicly resurrected by Mendelssohn in 1829 when he conducted The St. Matthew Passion.

Interesting!! not far off the parallel "discoveries" in painting so....

Another obvious case in point is of course the music of Vivaldi whose work is still turning up from time to time.

[Jose Echenique]

Has a similar thing happened with music...?? has JSB always been considered top notch since he started composing, or was he resurrected?

Absolutely not. JSB was completely forgotten and totally ignored until his music was publicly resurrected by Mendelssohn in 1829 when he conducted The St. Matthew Passion.

Interesting!! not far off the parallel "discoveries" in painting so....

Only a handful of composers have remained in the spotlight since they were alive: Palestrina, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven come to mind.
Handel survived the XIX Century mostly thanks to Messiah, though his operas and most of his other oratorios were indeed forgotten until the first XXth Century revivals in Göttingen in the 1920´s.
Vivaldi even more than Bach had to wait for the first chamber orchestras of our time (I Musici and I Virtuosi di Roma starting in the late 40´s), and his operas have only been resurrected in the last 2 decades.
And even as we speak more forgotten composers are being discovered: Graupner was virtually unknown as little as 5 years ago.

[fergus]

Schwanengesang.

[Ciaran]

Graupner!



I was listening to this recently! When you see another CD of baroque bassoon concertos with Sergio Azzolini playing, you don't stop very long to think about whether to buy! Wonderful!

[Jared]

another dose of the sublime Schubert Trios...

[fergus]

This is a really lovely performance with great playing and wonderful singing.

[bombasticDarren]

Saint-Saens - Bacchanale from Samson et Delila, Marche Militaire Francaise, Danse Macabre (Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, Sony Classical) & Le Carnaval des Animaux (Philippe Entremont et al, Sony Classical)