Let's talk music, no genre boundaries

@stuartk 

I remember listening to Stravinsky's Firebird on my little, cheap college stereo. Man did I enjoy that. I think the mind is the most important compnent in an audio system. Willfull suspension of disbelief. You can fill in the bass that isn't there and the space that isn't there with your mind. 

Beethoven's 7th is a much more dynamic piece than his 6th which was written to be laid back. If you can find Carlos Kleiber doing it, he's considered very good. Very, very good because it took him forever to get out a recording. He broke the budget on over rehearsing. Most of his recordings are almost perfect. He also somehow managed to find as much expression as everyone else while sticking to the script. I don't know how he did it exactly. @frogman ?

Besides being a fantastic musician, Kleiber had a gift for establishing great rapport with the musicians in the orchestra.  He was greatly admired and liked by the players.  That is huge.  He also had a specific and relatively small repertoire. He didn’t conduct as many different works as other conductors and so dug very deep into the details of the works that he did conduct,  Fantastic conductor. 

Kleiber get the allegretto of my favorite symphony to a new meaningful level...( The greatest musical orchestral movement ever written in my opinion so strong it was in his effect on the soul)

I see a seed invincibly pushing rocks  to grow...

( i always see music or associate it with images not as a mere poetic expression of my feelings but more like a movie, i can for example wrote a novel about the Bruckner 5th because i listened to it so much and it entered into my imaginative perception as "the meaning of life " itself as we experience it after death , because of the structure of this work especially the final fugue recapitulating and integrating each movement from the beginning. Bruckner rival Bach  mastery of fugue here in a way Bach never did.)

For me the 7th is the symphony , the art of Beethoven symphony as a creative engine with an irresistible rythm of his own able to liberate humanity from the sleep of inertia , habit, and lack of motives...

Music is cure and thought meditation...( the allegretto of the 7th must be able to make some paralysed person to walk again against all odds, which other piece of music can do this? listen to it ) 

By the way i love Scriabin so much, because all his work motives core is sparking human heart to begin to be divinely creative again as Beethoven was inducing  it  particularly strongly in the 7th , it is clear as crystal...

Beethoven soul (not his style) is Scriabin forebear...A Promethean giant inspiring another one...

«... Scriabin... Where does he come from?
And who are his forebears?»

IGOR STRAVINSKY in Poetics of Music

It's time to talk about Shostakovich, a 20th century composer who cannot be overlooked. I heard his 5th symphony when I was young and have always had it on vinyl, but not a great performance. I did not venture further until Dudamel had a Shostakovich year, and I heard his tenth and twelfth, I think. They were too complicated to really register. I was reading Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" a few years ago. In the book he talked about two people staying up all night to discuss Shostakovich's 7th Symphony. So, I have been listening to it since. I posted a youtube video of the piece. It's very long, and if you haven't heard it, just listen to the first movement. @frogman stresses rhythm in music, and I think Shostakovich was deeply into rhythm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3zR_X25UU

For me the essence of Shostakovich soul as a musician are his Bach inspired preludes &fugues by Tatiana Nikolaeva...

 She was a friend of Shostakovich and a giant pianist in Russia but almost unknown in the West...

 His playing flow from the source without any ego interference and the Bach majestic inspiration behind Shostakovich appear  and  makes him a brother of the German God...

 As anecdote Shostakovich feared so much Stalin,  unlike Maria Yudina who scorned Stalin in his face about his great sins and refuse his money, that he waited sleep each night with  a minimalistic luggage waiting under hisw bed in case he was deported in the Gulag...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyURjdnYQaU&list=PLiMumVBefK9IpPgqVqyJ33E4IDGiTK_-U

 As an aside, Russian music is so badly known in the West , that the best bio of Scriabin (690 pages) written by an American musician who lived in Russia in 1969 , Faubion Bowers,  dont even  mention in his first chapter about the history of Russian Music the name of  the stupendous genius Dmitry Bortnyansky (1751-1825) one of the greatest choral music composer not only in Russia but everywhere, Faubion Bowers begin speaking about Glinka...But nowadays after the stupendous recording of the Choral concertos by Poliansky it is a marvel to hear it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54VRvokl77Y&list=PLDML4XZqb7ZHN3VNnLwu__rtYZy8bWfPG

 The West ignore Russia...