I recently fell in love with classic music.But I don’t really know how to appreciate them in the right way.I need some suggestions. Thanks

Hi everyone. I just need a quick boost for my commute and walks. By choir here, I just mean vocalising — oh, ah, eh... I'm open to anything: film score, folk, original, reimagined, even non-Western. For example, The Ecstasy of Gold in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Hit me with your best shot, people. Thank you.

I'm listening to Beethoven's 1st & 2nd (Karajan 1962 recording) and I'm noticing that there is a lot of those noises on the recording. For me, they somewhat take away from my enjoyment of the piece - kind of like listening to a vinyl that has a lot of popping/static noises. You really hear them in the quieter parts of the recording, and for me it's pretty distracting.

Does this bother anyone else? Do you go out of your way to find recordings with less of these noises present? Are there any orchestras that are known to have very clean recordings of their works?

Tl;dr: I’m mystified how anyone can develop a love (or even a like) of Wagner if they are dependent on recordings and following lines of translated libretti. Yet there is no shortage of Wagner fans outside the natively German-speaking population. What’s up with that?

Over the years I’ve made a few casual attempts at listening to Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Tristan und Isolde, Das Rheingold), but I’ve always quickly become excruciatingly bored and decided not to push it. I’m usually happy to leave things until later in life to click.

More recently, though, I had a very positive response to a different dramatic score composed from wall-to-wall associative themes. I liked it so much that I’m now halfway through Matthew Bribitzer-Stull’s Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music (2015). This made me Wagner-curious again, and optimistic.

The biggest barrier, I figured, was not having a live performance with surtitles to keep me engaged. Sitting with a libretto and translation is much less immersive, involves constant cognitive effort, and is obviously far removed from the Gesamtkunstwerk experience Wagner conceived. This seemed like a non-generic barrier when it comes to Wagner's later operas, where (I assumed) the leitmotivic effect kinda relies on sustained immersion and attention.

Still, it’s not as if many people can just jump online and see which local orchestra is playing The Ring this month. Plenty of people successfully enjoy recordings, so I got myself a copy of Solti's Ring with the Vienna Philharmonic. To minimise dependence on line-by-line libretto tracking, I familiarised myself with the story in pretty good detail through synopses and even P. Craig Russell’s graphic novel adaptation.

I’ve made it through Das Rheingold, and I’m up to Act III of Die Walküre. I am excruciatingly bored, and I’m not confident that Siegfried is where I’ll finally cash in.

I have no complaints about the musical imagination or the orchestration; those are obvious highlights. I’m also enjoying the insight into just how much the Wagner sound influenced Hollywood composers. The preludes and transitional passages take my breath away, but they’re obviously a small minority of the runtime. Saying "I like the Ride of the Valkyries" isn’t the same thing as saying "I enjoy Wagner."

But there hasn’t really been a minute of the sung dialogue that I’ve honestly enjoyed. Which is, ya know, the majority of the operas. To me it all sounds like a disorganised rhapsody of musical ideas. It’s safe to say that, at least on this pass, the leitmotivic writing isn’t "working" on me.

I get mixed signals as to whether one should expect a satisfying experience on the first pass. Surely, if more than one were required, Wagner’s mature style would have flopped. Or at least, I can't see how it would have worked if it were significantly dependent on the faithful few willing to sign up for a second 16-hour run of The Ring. (Maybe it was Tristan that did it?)

Then there’s the language issue. I speak a fair amount of German, and I have no idea how anyone but a native speaker could immerse themselves in the experience to the degree apparently required. The writing is so archaic it feels like I had a stroke and forgot the language. Not that I’d expect to follow operatic singing easily anyway, but it does mean that close, unceasing line tracking from the libretto is necessary. If I lose my place, it’s not easy to find it again. It often felt like half my attention was spent keeping up with the translation instead of on the music where it belonged. So what hope do non-German-speakers have? 

And yet, Wagner fans, everywhere. Packed houses night after night. People traveling fair distances to see his operas. The potential for obsession is obvious from the outside. They can’t all be native German speakers. They can’t all have had their first exposure at a live performance with surtitles.

So, Wagner fans, how did your love of Wagner develop? How much effort was it? Am I doing something wrong?

Edit: formatting

Kirill Spivachevski-were born in Ukraine in Kiew, and he moved in Kharkiv where he plays in the piano over 13 year in music school by Rimskiy-Korsakov, his first time that he start to play the piano were only 4 years old, he surprised a teachers because he had absolutely hearing, when he was 7 years old he started to playing at the biggest theatre in his city Kharkiv name KHATOB (ХАТОБ)

And then he started improvising by himself without teachers-composers and classic theory, and after it he brought his first piano piece, but it was very bad and teacher refused him and a little bit critic
In 2022 year he moved to Germany where he met with Jazz-intellectual Ukrainian composer-teacher Yuri Seredin, and once afternoon his teacher Yuri improvised in class room, and Kirill were surprised and then he asked by him for lesson from composing and improvising

Lot of time they’re both improvised some melodys, and once Kirill listened any classical composers like Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Sergei Rachmaninoff…and he were influenced by them, one week later he wrote his first piano piece calls Nocturne no.1 (A-Dur) and he performed it in Strasbourgh Euro Parlament were he met with Oleksander Goncharenko and he highly praised the talent of 15-year-old Kirill! And also @Joshua Kyan Aalampour saw his Nocturne no.1 and also he highly praised him

At his 16 years he wrote a cycle of his Etüdes from young ages Etüde no.1 full filed with deep love emotions and influence by Franz Liszt and Camille Sen Saëns and he finished writing it in 00:30
Etude no.2 Winter he wrote at the next day after first Etude in school floor
Etude no.3 he wrote it after depression and that full filed a virtuosity and influencing by Sergei Rachmaninoff
After gave a concert in a house where people came to listen to all sorts of stories in one of the books, and Kirill performed the works "Spruce Tree (Le Sapin) by Jean Sibelius", "Turkish March by Mozart", "Czardas by Vittorio Monti", and finally his "Etude No. 3", which was written after his month-long depression and self criticism, and after concerto he earned 50 euros

Now Kirill is trying hard to write something new and masterful, and is squeezing out all his strength and abilities

Hello! As the title suggests I’m looking for something beautiful, ethereal, and growing to walk down the aisle to. Violin and Cello in an outdoor setting in Europe.

Songs I like but either find tricky to walk to / the obvious queue in for bride to start down the aisle
- air on a g string
- Jupiter
- rhapsody on a theme Paganini
- flower duet

I’m trying to avoid the obvious wedding marches as I want something that feels unique to us on the day

Thank you so much experts!!

Thanks to this unfiltered transfer, his tonal palette and his polyphonic treatment of the piece are much more apparent than in the famous released take. After listening to this recording, someone brought to my attention that the manner in which he plays the coda resembles that of a tarantella. Then I checked and realized the two pieces (tarantella and this ballade) were composed in the same year, 1841.

Does anyone feel like a piece of music feels less magical when you finally get to practising and performing it, compared to discovering it and listening for the first few times? I feel this with almost every piece I learn. Are there any exceptions for you?

What do you think of this AI composition?

Italian concerto - Bach

I am trying to find the music played in this short recording but alas i tried everything and unable to identify it. (as far as i understand it's from the Baroque era, but i could be wrong)

listened to youtube for days and nights, asked people / music teachers this is my last hope.

This is the recording:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wtP3k-1E0Kx9tn3LBJm3RhLrnDtqbkQM/view?usp=drive_link

if someone able to identify this music it would mean the world to me.

Just wondering if any of them made it....

Which of Shostakovich's string quartets are the most accessible and easy to listen to?

I've been struggling a lot with Shostakovich's string music (chamber music or concertos), but I recently discovered the first movement of his Second String Quartet. I found it less austere than usual and was wondering if there are other string quartet movements like it.

Personally, I find 4 incredibly beautiful, but 3 will always beat it out for me.

The 1959 recording of Stravinsky's Les Noces has Stravinsky himself conducting it, with the 4 pianos played by Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Roger Sessions. Do there even exist other recordings with such high concentrations of musical pedigree?

The Portuguese pianist turns 82 today. She is known less for display than for a kind of clarity and inwardness—an unwillingness to put herself between the music and the listener—especially in Chopin and Mozart.

For years her live performances were among the quiet pleasures of concert life, and it is striking how many of them are now freely available to watch. In June 2025 she stepped away after a stroke, and later that year announced her retirement from performing, which makes both the studio recordings and those preserved concerts worth returning to.

There's also the famous moment in Amsterdam when she sat down to a Mozart concerto in concert having prepared a different one, and found her way through it under Riccardo Chailly—if you haven't seen the clip, it's worth finding.

Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2, iii: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t6_StAyOeg

Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEWTYBn8vpc

Debussy: Clair de lune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_I0wWZMFAc

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 9 "Jeunehomme": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plfty7jbM_g

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 (with Frans Brüggen, period instruments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR95EK9fEKo

I am currently trying to identify the voices in fugue No. 8 from Czerny's Op. 400 before playing it. The images below show what I have so far (bass: red, tenor: green, alto: blue, soprano: yellow).

Is what I have so far correct? I honestly don't know too much about fugues.

More importantly, what are the voices in measures 33-39? Pay attention to the notes circled in brown (are they some sort of fifth voice?).

Hi all, I know musicians can write off things like recordings, concert tickets, sheet music, etc. However, with all the AI slop out there, I'm having trouble finding a good reputable source for this information that I can reference when advocating for myself. Any help would be appreciated - thank you!

Any Opera Fans out there?

I believe that in an ideal world, traditional live performers wouldn’t exist. Instead, they would be replaced by a new class of musician: "interpreters." An interpreter’s sole role is to translate notes on sheet music into refined sonic structures to broadcast a profound vision of a work. This way, the only measuring stick for a musician's worth is the depth and nuance of their creative vision, not their physical dexterity.

Why force musicians to sink decades into mastering physical instrumental technique just to avoid mistakes under the high-pressure environment of a stage? In my ideal world, like painter placing deliberate brushstrokes on a canvas, an interpreter’s job should be to meticulously calibrate every single note by adjusting timbre, volume, pitch, micro-dynamics, and timing to perfectly align with their creative vision.

In this paradigm, the primary instrument isn't a violin or a piano. Instead, it's a highly advanced DAW that grants total control over every parameter, with physical instruments existing purely as tools for audio sampling.

Why all of this you ask? Because live performances are inherently plagued by human error, stage fright, poor venue acoustics, and intonation slips. Studio-driven interpretation ensures the artistic vision is realized flawlessly every single time through the tiniest of margins. I don't really get why society remains stubbornly obsessed with the athletic spectacle of live execution and physical acrobatics?

Fleisher had two careers. In the first, he was one of the leading American pianists of his generation; his Beethoven and Brahms concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, recorded around 1959–61, are still reference recordings.

Then focal dystonia in his right hand ended his two-handed playing in the mid-1960s, at the height of that career. He did not leave music. He spent the following decades on the left-hand repertoire, teaching, and conducting. Only much later, after experimental treatment gave him back some use of the hand, did he return to playing with both hands.

His post-recovery recording of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze" is usually where people start with the later Fleisher.

Bach (arr. Fleisher): Sheep May Safely Graze, BWV 208: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyOEOuUPvM0

The Beethoven and Brahms concertos with Szell (1959–61) are worth seeking out for the playing of his first career.

Beethoven Piano Concerto Cycle: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhz_qQCN2Frrkazb387HogUVmdBUi0GgX

Brahms Piano Concerto Cycle etc.: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxV6VwFCe96_hqpOKkdOIiF5G7IVdZSFn