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Ralph Hurley posted:Is opera part of classical music or is that a separate category? I don’t think I like opera very much but I heard it a lot as a kid because my mom loved it. A few years ago she gave me her entire record collection and there’s a ton of mostly Italian opera box sets. I’m talking gorgeous boxes of six LPs. Lots of Pavarotti. I’ve been meaning to try and dive into this stuff and give it a chance but I don’t know where to start and I don’t know anything about it. The idea of a piece of music that takes almost an entire day to get through is daunting. I checked out the Barber of Seville because of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and figaro figaro figaro. hi opera singer here what kind of opera you like depends on what other kind of classical/not classical music you like and what you value in a piece of music. opera can be a really hard sell to people, especially mid-18th and early-19th century opera, because the drama is in a lot of cases subservient to the musical form and style of the day. a great example of this is Handel operas, which mostly conform to story-aria-story-aria-story-aria all the way through because that's Just How You Wrote Back Then. opera got a lot better once it started being able to have more than one soloist go at a time, imo! commonly suggested "starter" operas are La traviata by Verdi, which by today's standards is a stuffy period drama but which has lots of catchy tunes in it, Le nozze di Figaro by Mozart, which is loooong and can be hard to follow, but has lots of fun characters, Carmen by Bizet, which has some of the most famous pieces in opera and which is a genuine thrill ride the whole way through, and La boheme by Puccini, which is okay I guess. i also recommend gilbert and sullivan for new opera fans - sullivan uses a lot of early-mid 19th century opera composers (Rossini, Donizetti, Offenbach) as the basis for his musical parody. but there's more to opera than just pretty tunes! Puccini's Tosca is a gripping melodrama, Berg's Wozzcek is extremely dissonant and dark and depressing, Britten's The Turn of the Screw is both a creepy ghost story and a monument to the expressive power of variation form, and Peter Ash's The Golden Ticket is a funny and downright strange take on the classic Willy Wonka story. i truly believe there's an opera out there to suit anyone's taste. this is an open invitation: tell me what you like in music and I'll give you a few recommendations!
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Feb 11, 2024 19:51
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nice obelisk idiot posted:That's very interesting XYZAB. Somewhat related to that, I've found that Schumann can be unsettling to me, and I think that it's related to his very likely bipolar disorder. Almost like my brain starts churning like Schumann's brain a bit. seconded, i think since Schumann is so canonized a lot of classical music people are sorta numb to how Weird he can get
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Feb 11, 2024 19:56
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Hasturtium posted:I fell down a wormhole with Hildegard von Bingen a few years ago. This was a surprise to me as much as anyone - I’m an agnostic who mostly listens to ambient, house, electronica, metal, and future bass - but Bingen made beautiful music. It’s about time I dive back into her work again, but I will happily take suggestions on other medieval classical composers. i'm not religious either but liturgical music can go really hard when it wants to i'm really in to late 19th and early 20th century Anglican music, like Charles Villiers Stanford and Herbert Howells. I think Saint-Saens also wrote some great sacred music. and of course there's the verdi requiem for ultimate head-banging pleasure
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Feb 11, 2024 20:00
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