Most achingly-beautiful music

Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain.
Joni Mitchell, Blue.
Jefferson Airplane, "Comin' Back to Me" from Surrealistic Pillow.
Charlie Haden, Magico.
Nanci Griffith, "From a Distance," on One Fair Summer Evening.
Joan Baez, Diamonds & Rust.

Dave Van Ronk died of colon cancer on February 10, 2002, at the age of 65. He released more than 40 albums during his long career. I don't know if it ever came out on CD, but I'd love to get a CD or Minidisc copy of the early 1968 LP "Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters," in which he did the most achingly beautiful cover of "Clouds" (Both Sides Now), the Joni Mitchell classic. His recording finally gave a good song the piercing intensity it needed in that year we lost Robert F. Kennedy and what little was left of our national innocence.

Can anyone help me out? hubbard2@cox.net

Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin, Etc., Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Antal Dorati conducting, London 411 894-2, 1985. Track 10, the Allegro from Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, is the best test for bass response in full-range speakers and a powerful amp's ability to clarify extremely complex (and beautiful) orchestral passages. This cut also has the added benefit of driving most audio salesmen out of the listening room.

If you *don't* clearly hear the enormous bass drum that enters at about 3:00 minutes into the piece, then your system is simply missing the lowest octave. The entry of the bass drum should not just be a quiet suggestion of something going on in the bass, it should have the same full, expanding "bloom" as a large orchestral gong and be quite loud. Sometimes I do miss my Vandersteen 4's!

Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Rubinstein)
Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (Telarc)

My three choices are Ravel's String Quartet in F major by the Ad Libitum Quartet,Bela Bartok String Quartet No. 4 by the Juilliard String Quartet, and Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8 in C minor by the Emerson String Quartet.
One thing I have just learned about classical music is that one piece played by different musicians can affect you differently.The musicians that I named seem to play the pieces that I named just a bit more effectively than some others that I have heard.