Classical Music for Aficionados


I would like to start a thread, similar to Orpheus’ jazz site, for lovers of classical music.
I will list some of my favorite recordings, CDs as well as LP’s. While good sound is not a prime requisite, it will be a consideration.
  Classical music lovers please feel free to add to my lists.
Discussion of musical and recording issues will be welcome.

I’ll start with a list of CDs.  Records to follow in a later post.

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique.  Chesky  — Royal Phil. Orch.  Freccia, conductor.
Mahler:  Des Knaben Wunderhorn.  Vanguard Classics — Vienna Festival Orch. Prohaska, conductor.
Prokofiev:  Scythian Suite et. al.  DG  — Chicago Symphony  Abbado, conductor.
Brahms: Symphony #1.  Chesky — London Symph. Orch.  Horenstein, conductor.
Stravinsky: L’Histoire du Soldat. HDTT — Ars Nova.  Mandell, conductor.
Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances. Analogue Productions. — Dallas Symph Orch. Johanos, cond.
Respighi: Roman Festivals et. al. Chesky — Royal Phil. Orch. Freccia, conductor.

All of the above happen to be great sounding recordings, but, as I said, sonics is not a prerequisite.


128x128rvpiano
Vera Dulova
She was the queen of harp in Russia, famous at Bolshoi.  Exquisite.
"Russian Performing School", Mozart, Donizetti, Saint-Saens, Ravel, Pascal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Dulova

@jcazador      Hi Jeremy those were interesting links you sent , I just wish I could buy a 4 Terabyte
byte SSD for $449.00. I have a Samsung 1 Terabyte
byte drive I bought over here for nearly £400.00 ( my wife thought I was stark raving Bonkers ).

You asked what I have for listening to well I now only use my computer for music with streaming and hard drive music storage the two main things.

My computer is a bespoke one I built myself and truth be told I am quite proud of it as it is a very powerful beast indeed. If you want something like it you have to be very fastidious indeed.

Integral to the build is first of all a tower that is built for music first and foremost so you will need it to be acoustically damped and sound proofed. I have installed an ASUS gaming motherboard with Intel
 i7 processor running at 3.8 gigahertz and 64 gig of DDR4 memory.

My motherboard runs from a linear power supply and I also have it running from it's own complete spur from the mains. I have A J Play USB card and a J Play network card and those run from another linear power supply. Inside the PC I only employ SSDs , one for my Windows system and two for my main interests of Orchestral music and Concertos and another one for solo Keyboard.. I Backup music to  HDD hard drives and these are also backing up music which I do not listen to very often so it saves space on the SSDs.

My software is quite novel in that my PC is built to have as little jitter as I can. My Windows system is a heavily trimmed 10 Pro build in the jitter producing stuff like Cortana, One Drive and a whole host of other things stripped away. My pal over in California installed a raft of his software on it . It was expensive but well worth it as before the software was installed I had a thread count of three and a half thousand and a process count of two hundred and twenty and it is down now to seven hundred and forty and seventy two,

My other stuff is the PC goes straight to a PS Audio Direct Stream DAC and I listen via a pair of Sennheiser HD 800 phones and they are fed by a Sennheiser HDVD Phone Amp. The system is bare bones clean so  it brings out some detail from the conductors and orchestra of which grunts ,page turning intakes of breath and the like are very much to the fore.

I think I have said it before but when I built this beast I put it up against my CD player and it blew the CD Player out of the room. The CD player was a Gryphon Mikado Signature, No slouch itself.



Len pal I am fast catching up on you there , I now get my daughter to tune in and program the video from the remote as I am sure having difficulty now .
I've always turned to Karajan for Sibelius 5, but I'm really liking the Simon Rattle version, which I have on a disc paired with 7.  A real winner.