Day 01. Your favorite song

[mlr]

I enjoyed the first two entries in cpratt's meme. But I have a fairly limited knowledge of popular music, so I'm going to slightly change it to suit what I know. My favorite piece of music: Beethoven String Quartet, Opus 130, 3rd movement    Runner up: Mahler Symphony No. 9, 1st movement          This is maybe a better performance of the Beethoven movement. And this a more visually interesting performance of the Mahler.

Comments

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

You've definitely piqued my interest here, but I hate listening to stuff via YouTube. Which CDs/recordings would you suggest of these guys? (Preferably something I can find used on Amazon?)

[mlr.livejournal.com]

Maybe a bit like wine - but not nearly the possibilities. Some ensembles are better with some composers. Sometimes an ensemble's second round of recordings is better than the first, etc. The newer groups will usually be better recorded (but not always). And there are subtle shifts of taste over time. Young players today come at these pieces with different knowledge and backgrounds than those of 40 years ago, and that will be reflected in their performances in a subtle way. In the end, it's personal taste. The comments on Amazon should be somewhat helpful. When someone bothers to write a string quartet review on Amazon they're usually fairly serious - not quite the realm of Yahoo movie reviews.

The Late Beethoven Quartets

The heart of the late quartets are Opus 132, 130, & 131, grouped by their keys of A,B (flat), & C (sharp) and the number of movements: 5, 6, & 7 respectively. Opus 127 and 135 were composed closely with these and are grouped with them - but both are more traditional in their structure and moods.

My first recordings were by Quartetto Italiano on LPs. I loved them and I see they are still available. Later I owned a Cleveland Quartet recording in the early 90s, and now have one by the Fine Arts Quartet.

A lot of the really good older groups are available on Amazon: Emerson, Quartetto Italiano, Cleveland, Juilliard. The Juilliard is very fine but was not my favorite on late Beethoven, but all of these would be recommended.

If I were going to buy today I would buy one by the Leipziger Quartett. I'm just starting to be drawn to them - I have a couple of discs coming in the mail.

My second choice would be the Alban Berg Quartett.

Third I would try the Végh Quartet which I didn't know about until this post.


I'll do Mahler 9 separately in another comment.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Thank you kindly for the exhaustive information. The next, more difficult step is of course to find space to listen to this sort of music properly: most of my listening is done during the commute, and there's something about the traffic on I-8 that I'm thinking just isn't going to work with longer pieces of music...