12 responses so far ↓

• 1 shaunyu // May 1, 2008 at 2:09 pm

  My Favorite Piece of Music…

  Arvo Part’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”.

  On February 3, 1998, my wife, Jennifer, and I had our very first date. Dinner and a chamber music concert. I was so captivated over dinner, we were late for the concert. So late, in fact, we only got to hear the final piece, “Spiegel im Spiegel” (translated “Mirror in Mirror”), and we’ve loved it ever since. Married 8 years this June.

• 2 Hank Cates // May 1, 2008 at 10:06 pm

  Barber’s violin concerto does it for me. It embodies all that I love about classical music. It comforts and consoles me. It gets inside my head and heart. It fills a space in me that I didn’t realize was empty when I hear it.

• 3 Jill Bishop // May 2, 2008 at 10:10 am

  There are two pieces of classical music that really stand out for me, and they are both related to “place” ….Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (Pastorale) and Mahler’s 6th Symphony. Seems I like the 6’s, but really it’s just a coincidence!

  I listened to Beethoven’s 6th Symphony on my iPod while watching the sunset over the Grand Canyon in June of 2006. One of the most incredible 45 minutes of my life! Now every time I hear it, it takes me back to that magic moment.

  I first heard Mahler’s 6th Symphony (Tragic) in April 2005 during my first visit to see the DPO at the Schuster Center. I was blown away by the beauty and world-class acoustics of the Schuster….and by Mahler’s 6th!

• 4 Steffin Johnson // May 6, 2008 at 10:53 pm

  There are a lot of pieces at the top of my list, and the number one work changes all the time. (Chopin’s Ballades/Scherzi, Liszt’s Totentanz, Prokifiev’s third piano concerto, and the Yellow River Concerto are just a few that are up there).
  If I were forced to pick a piece right now,I would have to say it would be Islamey by Balakirev. There is something about its difficulty that attracts me to it. Plus, it fits my personality, as it is very upbeat and energetic!

• 5 Georgie Woessner // May 16, 2008 at 12:45 pm

  My favorite musical moment occured in college. One of the women in my living unit was a voice major. I’d watched her go back and forth to the music building across the street but I’d really not paid too much attention and, honestly, I didn’t really get “her” music. Then, in the spring of my senior year, she asked a few of us to be a small audience for her because she had a final the next afternoon.

  I never did learn what aria she sang that day and it doesn’t matter. What I did learn was the power of music and the human voice to bring tears to my eyes, to make me gasp for breath and to make the hair on the back of my arm stand on end.

  It was magic…and I’ll never be able to thank her enough for introducing me to something so spectacular.

• 6 Helena // Jun 6, 2008 at 12:00 pm

  Coincidently enough, I discovered my two favorite pieces of music while working here at WDPR, and they were both played by my MOST favorite Conductor & Music Director, CWW. The first piece is Scheherazade Symphonic Suite for Orchestra Op 35 by Korsakov, and the Second is Adagio in G Minor by Tomaso Albinoni. When I first heard both of those pieces for the first time, it literally stopped me in my tracks and I was compelled to just stop everything and sit down and enjoy the music. I think that is what music is meant to do to you, it speaks to you in a way that makes you slow down and forces you to appreciate it. Music is like people. It has personality, soul, no one piece is like the other…..

• 7 Larry Coressel // Jun 16, 2008 at 12:03 pm

  While words like “soothing” and “relaxing” are often used to describe favorite pieces of music, I have to say that my favorite work is anything but.

  The second movement from the Symphony No. 4 by Charles Ives is hands-down my favorite piece of concert music. The clashing harmonies, the insane potpourri of American tunes and the downright audacious attitude of the piece blew me away the first time I heard it as a teenager.

  I’ve been listening to a lot of Ives lately (in my so-called spare time), and find that his music, the 4th Symphony in particular, still speaks to me and takes on an even darker yet humorous edge in this election year 2008.

  It is quite simply (and complexly) the ultimate slice of orchestral Americana.

• 8 Jesibel // Sep 2, 2008 at 4:50 pm

  Rhapsody in Blue; enough said.

• 9 Oliver Radcliffe // Dec 23, 2008 at 5:20 pm

  My favorite piece of classical music is most probably; Etude Tableau op. 33 no.8 in g minor, by Sergei Rachmaninoff
  I love its simply serene beauty, and its elegant way of expressing its feeling.

• 10 Bob Kienzle // Dec 31, 2008 at 5:04 pm

  The first classical music I can remember hearing was the broadcast of Carmen from the Met on a Saturday about 65 years ago. I was entranced and that opera remains high on my list. As I peruse the 2008 “Top Hundred” list I’m amazed at how many selections played in between the elite 100 are favorites.

• 11 Ron Staub // Jan 13, 2009 at 2:02 am

  I have never made any secret of my admiration for the music of Hector Berlioz…nor that my favorite symphony is his Fantastique. The simple reason is that it moves me more than any other symphonic work. He was a great orchestrator with a marvelous musical imagination. The Fantastique also elicits the Tom Sawyer in me: I have always been intrigued that Berlioz wrote it to attract the attention of actress Harriet Smithson — and more or less succeeded. Less…in the sense that their subsequent marriage turned out disastrously. But the SF gloriously lives on some 180 years after its premiere. Concert music made a great turn in the road when Berlioz and Beethoven (the Pastoral) composed program symphonies.

• 12 Lloyd Bryant // Feb 8, 2009 at 9:10 pm

  Growing up in a small town in South Georgia, I had no exposure to “classical music” that I was aware of at the time (later realized some of the band pieces we played were arrangements of classical themes). I “discovered” classical music big time as a college freshman when friends took me to an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra performance that ended with Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite.” In today’s parlance, I was blown away (I thought “if that’s classical music, I want MORE!”) and immediately dived headlong into everything I could find about it from recordings to knowledgeable friends to live concerts. It has not abated to this day. Years ago when I was working as a radio DJ at commercial stations and playing rock ‘n’ roll and popular music, I used to bug the station manager to let me have some time to program classical (such things were easier to do back then). Favorites? In those early days I could tell you my top three in order. As listening experiences have expanded over the years, so has the list of favorites. Today it is impossible to pick just one. It is now 50 years since that fateful concert in Atlanta, and I am still discovering incredible classical music. The list keeps growing.

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