I'm starting to really enjoy...ahem...Classical Music

I've always loved it in Metal, and in certain rare moods and contexts, but recently I've really been actively enjoying and seeking it out. I prefer fast and bright sounding stuff. I want the song to "get on with it", but I'm becoming a fan.

I love Classical - I have roughly 300 to 350 Classical CDs - My favs are Mozart and Haydn.
So much great quality music.

The only classical music I really enjoy is Vivaldi and Beethoven.  

I really love Vivaldi's "Four Seasons'.  I first heard "Spring" as hold music about 25 years ago and I was hooked.

Based on how much I enjoy Therion I suspect I'd also enjoy Wagner but I've never listened to anything by him other than "What's Opera Doc?"  You know..."Kill the Wabbit, kill the Wabbit"

I like a lot of classical.I would say Mozart is one of my favorites.

I dig it because I grew up with it from my dad. I still have a CD collection with accompanying magazines of the great composers that he used to collect. My favorites are probably Tchaikovsky & Dvorak

Thanks to Loudness and Yes I like Holst and Stravinsky. A few months ago, I went to an orchestral performance of Sibelius and Tchaikovsky material and during Christmas, Handel's Messiah. Classical is so awesome live! If you get a chance to see an orchestra.... GO!

Others I like:
Bartok
Bach
Mussorgsky

I like it when it's played with loud, distorted guitars.......

Love classical music, started listening around age 9. I was originally inspired to check it out because of my love of ELO at the time. Back in those wonderful days when the public library had huge LP collections you could check out.

Debussy and Bach are my top picks.

Favorite individual piece is probably Rachmaninoff's "Variations on a theme of Paganini". I first heard that piece of music in the film Somewhere In Time (1980).

Tchaikovsky's my classical hero.

Classical was my first musical love; I used to tape pieces off of local public radio and label them with the composer and title. I was probably around 5 or 6. When I was in college in my 20's I employed classical for helping me study and I fell in love with it all over again. I also discovered how the periods differed from each other, and romantic became my preference. Beethoven's Ninth still gives me chills. Grieg's Peer Gynt suite (I had to look that one up it's been so long!) was my alarm clock for waking up. Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 2 was my meditation piece. I was pretty passive with Bach (baroque kind of bores me) but I did use it for studies a lot, especially with Andres Segovia's guitar arrangements. But T's 1812 Overture has always been heavy metal to me.

My wife is also a professional flutist; her listening preference is classical so we have CD's and records all over the house. I haven't really been into it for a long time now but it's nice to have in the background or on car rides.

I don't mind classical music when I hear it, but I don't know enough about it to know one composer/performer from another. There are a few particular works I recognize as "Oh, that's Beethoven" or whatever, but that's it.

corplhicks wrote:

Andres Segovia's guitar arrangements.

LOVE that guy(many cds and lps of him) and Christopher Parkening as well!

chewie wrote:

corplhicks wrote:

Andres Segovia's guitar arrangements.

LOVE that guy(many cds and lps of him) and Christopher Parkening as well!

John Williams (guitarist, not the film composer) is my all-time favorite classical guitarist.

Runner-up is Eliot Fisk.

My mother is a classical pianist so I grew up around classical music.  My first album was Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra perfoming Prokofiev: Peter & The Wolf.  I still have it actually.  Because of this I've always had a soft spot for classical music and I enjoy going to the symphony on occasion.  Paradoxically, I can't stand heavy metal with any symphonic elements.  

Most supposedly "symphonic" arrangements on metal records are so poorly arranged, executed and mixed it's an insult to even reference "classical" in the same sentence, usually they are like badly scored Broadway soundtrack music.

I like string sections on rock records, I think that can work beautifully when arranged correctly, but brass or a full orchestra is much trickier to get right.

I love a lot of classical music, started listening to it because of Yngwie, believe it or not, when I was like 13 or 14

I can only really dig the piano stuff. When all that other shit starts coming in, I find it a little annoying. But all piano? I'm down.

manny wrote:

I love a lot of classical music, started listening to it because of Yngwie, believe it or not, when I was like 13 or 14

I think that's great, that's what an artist like Yngwie should do, turn people onto the music that inspired them to become a player.

Eyesore wrote:

I can only really dig the piano stuff. When all that other shit starts coming in, I find it a little annoying. But all piano? I'm down.

I think you would really enjoy solo classical guitar then. I highly recommend this compilation disc of John Williams called Guitar Greatest Hits. You can get it used on Amazon for about $4.

Guitar Greatest Hits

In the beginning,
Malmsteen exploded an entire new genre of metal - as far as I'm concerned -
Paganini is pretty much it for me. Rochmonaov (sic) is good.
The biographies on all these top guys from centuries ago, are wild.
The Mozart movie, Bethoveen 'Immortal Beloved' - they were that day's rockers !

Used to own some. I've enjoyed it since I first saw the connection in metal. I enjoy Vivaldi the most.

I dig the Baroque dudes most...

Antonio Vivaldi
Johann Sebastian Bach
George Handel

Then these more modern-ish types

Peter Tchaikovsky
Richard Wagner
Joseph Brahms

As far as classical guitarists go

Alberto Ponce
John Williams
Kazuhito Yamashito

I have and always will enjoy "classical" music. Orchestral film scores are a passion for me and what fills my music library. I do have many many "standards" from the A and B list classical composers too.

My alarm clock radio and vehicle both are locked on the local classical station as the bulk of the radio stations around play nothing of interest to my ears...

I love At Vance's cover of Vivaldi's "Spring". I think it's pretty faithful to the classical version.

As a music educator (choir) I studied lots of classical music while in college. My favorite eras are the Romantic thru the early 20th century: Beethoven, Brahms, the Russians (Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rimksy-Korsakov), Debussy, Stravinsky (The Rite of Spring is very metal!). As a choir director by trade, I feel obligated to mention the Renaissance era as well. Some of the most beautiful and moving choral music ever written. Start with Palestrina or Thomas Tallis!

Since I mentioned Palestrina, I thought I'd share this. The Latin text is from Psalm 42:1 "As the deer longs for running water, so my soul longs for Thee, O God."