Who do you consider to be the GOAT amongst classical music composers?

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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
The Chopin Competition is over, and the winner is a Canadian pianist, Bruce Liu. Here is the prize winning performance.
Liu was trained completely in Canada at the Montreal Conservatory (his hometown) and the Royal Conservatory in Toronto, the same school which trained Glenn Gould.
Gould himself would have been impressed with the clarity and individuality of Liu's interpretation.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcOjKXIR8Iw
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Here is the Canadian gentleman who is the principal teacher of the new winner of the Chopin competition, he won the Chopin competition himself in 1980.

Here he gives a lesson in Chopin sonorities. He also plays a portion of the slow movement to the Chopin No. 1 concerto which his student Bruce Liu plays above in winning this 2021 competition.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJnGBQbtYW0
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Here are past winners of the Chopin Competition. I have heard four of them play live, Garrick Ohlsson (2012), Kevin Kenner (2020), Yundi Li (2010), and Seongin Cho (2020).

This review of past winners ends with a question mark for 2021....that question has now been answered.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=29a4SYziQpQ
 
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Deleted member 629564

Guest
Dan Lobb said:
The Chopin Competition is over, and the winner is a Canadian pianist, Bruce Liu. Here is the prize winning performance.

Click to expand...
That's not precise enough. Piano cto performance was the final stage number four. He was awarded for the whole effort, four competition stages in total including performances of e.g. etudes, mazurkas, ballades, sonatas.

Special prize for the best piano concerto performance went to the Spanish pianist Martin Garcia Garcia (op. 21):
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
threehandedbackhand said:
That's not precise enough. Piano cto performance was the final stage number four. He was awarded for the whole effort, four competition stages in total including performances of e.g. etudes, mazurkas, ballades, sonatas.
Click to expand...
Yes, Garcia had a wonderful Chopin competition and finished Third. Bruce Liu's performance of concerto No. 1, Garcia played No. 2, was the best performance in this competition of the No. 1, and gave him the Number One spot and the competition win.
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Shortly before this Chopin competition, Bruce Liu performed a concert for Canada's Jeunesse Musicale, an organization which I worked with many years ago.

He includes Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata here. He plays a Bosendorfer grand, my favourite.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwVV0nibyM0
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Recently, the two Shostakovich piano concertos have received outstanding performances. Here is one from the recent reopening of Carnegie Hall in New York, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the second concerto. It was a celebratory concerto for Shostakovich, celebrating the death of Stalin and Stalinism in 1957, which had posed a longstanding threat to the composer for decades.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyGBKlxWQB8
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
And here is a very recent performance of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1, composed in his trademark style, which caused such annoyance to Stalin. Stalin was an avid classical music lover who hated Shostakovich's music, causing the composer to continually fear for his life. This concerto from 1934 shows the composer at his wittiest and most annoying.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=olvP6GZclgA
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Also at that 2017 Rubinstein Competition, Bruce Liu gave a superb, controlled performance of the Prokofiev Seventh piano sonata, part of a splendid showing at that competition. Very strange that Bruce Liu failed to get a medal at that competition, as the three medalists from 2017 have not been notably successful in the years since then. In fact, the gold medalist from 2017 Rubinstein failed to reach the finalists' stage at this year's Chopin Competition, which Bruce Liu won.

click on "Watch on Youtube"
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
We are approaching the end of the Mozart celebration year, and here is an appropriate tribute from Chopin to Mozart, a set of variations on a central melody from Mozart's Don Giovanni. This performance by Bruce Liu at the recent Chopin Competition probably catapulted him into the lead position.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6C2z385GfQ
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
the tennis oracle said:
Not sure if you already posted this Dan, but here’s a lovely live performance of #15 from Yeol Eum. I’m finding I much prefer live performances over studio recordings in the current covid era, and the climax of the sublime 2nd mvt at 15:00 - 15:36 nearly brought tears to my eyes, esp in light of hearing the Proms has been canceled again. The 3rd mvt is pure Amadeus exuberance and charm!
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Here is the BBC posting of this concert, shows more footage of the beginning and end, this performance at Royal Albert Hall was the largest live audience which she has played to.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=einhMKTGbt4
 
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BarNotchky

BarNotchky

Semi-Pro
Benjamin Zander, to 19 yo french horn soloist...

"That applause is saying: you know, we spend our lives in ordinary mundane affairs. We behave in a mundane way, we dress in a mundane way. We walk to the office, we work in the office, we come home on the train, we say hello to our family and then we die... and then Tchaikovsky comes in and reminds us that we have another whole world of passion, of love, of frustration, of sorrow, of tragedy, of desire. You know, the entire range of human emotions available... Through your Horn!"

 
antony

antony

Hall of Fame
TimHenmanATG said:
Is it Ludwig van GOAThoven, Wolfgang Amadeus GOATzart, Piotr Ilyech GOATkovsky, or someone else?

My personal favourite classical composer has to be Tchaikovsky. My favourite operatic composer is Rossini.
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You just reminded me that I had a literal dream about Bach and his Goldberg variations last night
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
BarNotchky said:
Benjamin Zander, to 19 yo french horn soloist...

"That applause is saying: you know, we spend our lives in ordinary mundane affairs. We behave in a mundane way, we dress in a mundane way. We walk to the office, we work in the office, we come home on the train, we say hello to our family and then we die... and then Tchaikovsky comes in and reminds us that we have another whole world of passion, of love, of frustration, of sorrow, of tragedy, of desire. You know, the entire range of human emotions available... Through your Horn!"
Click to expand...
Here is Dennis Brain, the legendary French horn player, with the same movement in 1954, Karajan conducting. Brain made the French horn sound like a vocal line. Very refined playing.

 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
And that other great Christmas oratorio besides the Bach, composed by Handel for a boy's choir in Dublin. Here is that Handel work with the Academy of Ancient Music and a live broadcast from a few days ago, using a youth choir, and allowing girls to participate. Very enthusiastic singing. Hogwood made the Academy performances famous for recreating the original first performance using a boy's choir, but recently the Academy has experimented with various types of choirs.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiBHbadRVBU
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Mozart celebration year is drawing to a close, but here is one of the prominent achievements of the celebration....Piano Concerto 24 with Yeol Eum Son at the keyboard and the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, live, available for another 23 days. This pianist has performed several Mozart concertos this year, each performance an exemplary achievement.

Begins at the 2:00 point.

www.bbc.co.uk

Through the Night - Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Mahler's Fourth Symphony - BBC Sounds

Alan Gilbert conducts the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Another choral work genre associated with Christmas is the Ave Maria, here is Mendelssohn's setting. Mendelssohn was perhaps the most idiomatic of all choral composers.

Click on "Watch On Youtube"

 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Bach's Christmas Oratorio was a compendium of six cantatas on the Christmas season, performed one week at a time in church, and extending beyond the New Year into January.
Here is a recent New Year performance of number five from Switzerland.
Click "Watch on YouTube".
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Cesar Franck has had a mixed critical appreciation, but despite his status below the greatest composers of his century, Franck has managed to place a number of works within the standard repertoire for more than 150 years, a rare achievement. How many musical works created today will last within the standard repertoire for more than one hundred years?

Here is Franck's violin sonata, which is one of the most well known works of its type.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ5fzIUoDjQ
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Another Franck work which has maintained its place in the standard repertoire for well over a century. Here is the prime standard for this symphony, with the greatest French conductor.
Monteux actually attended the world premiere of the Franck symphonic masterpiece in 1889.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7obO7XyyQc
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
This is Elmer Bernstein's 100th birthday year, his most well-known work being the film score for Magnificent Seven. Seeing the film in rushes without music, Bernstein commented that it seemed to be a dull, slow-moving film, and he decided to give it a "musical kick in the pants" to add some momentum to the scenes. He succeeded in spades.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=yulmgTcGLZw
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Mendelssohn composed the quintessential funeral aria, sung here by Jon Vickers (for whom my wife and I sang a few months before his own passing), in Ottawa at the 1979 funeral of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, a longtime close friend of Vickers from the Prince Albert area. Vickers gives an appropriate power to this aria, of how "the righteous" will "shine forth".

In 1973, I was lining up to board a flight in Regina airport, when my dad said to me, "you have some distinguished fellow-travelers, Dan", and right beside me in the line were Diefenbaker and his wife. I did not say hello, but many passersby did.

 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Here is Vickers in a new transfer of his most celebrated Wagner role performed live in 1967 at Salzburg with the Berlin Philharmonic and Karajan conducting.

This may be the best "Die Walkure" performance of them all. Karajan was pumped for this occasion.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzLFhE1BkWQ
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Vickers' favourite Wagner character was Parsifal, of which this 1964 Bayreuth performance, the final performance conducted by Knappertsbusch, who had owned this work for more than half a century, is the foremost realization. The final scene starting at 3:45 is the most convincingly sung here of any.

During these performances in 1964, Vickers was billeted with an elderly woman who expressed her longing for the good old days of the National Socialists, which Vickers was repelled by. His own older brothers had served in World War II and seen horrific action. Vickers would never sing at Bayreuth again after this live performance.

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdWjZINGkfw
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Another Salzburg performance from 1972 also featured Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of "Tristan und Isolde". This was the same vocal cast with which Karajan had just completed the recording of the work, with this live performance showing even more energy and electricity. Matchless.

This was Vickers' second assumption of one of Wagner's "Arthurian" operas, both Tristan and Parsifal were prominent knights of King Arthur's Round Table. One of Vicker's fellow music students at the Toronto Conservatory, baritone Robert Goulet, who had the same vocal teacher as Vickers, would eventually gain fame for performing the role of another prominent knight from Arthur's Round Table, Sir Lancelot in the Lerner/Lowe "Camelot" musical. The original 5 1/2 hour version of Camelot, the length of a Wagner opera, earned the tab from one critic of being "like Gotterdammerung without the laughs".

https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=H86ev8YBaAQ
 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
The Karajan/Vickers musical partnership was central to Wagner performance in the 1960's and 1970's, giving us supreme representations of the greatest Wagner operas.

Another central Wagnerian partnership from the 1937-1952 era which reached the heights of Wagner interpretation was the Furtwangler/Flagstad combination.

Flagstad also worked with Reiner and Leinsdorf at the Metropolitan Opera and Covent Garden to bring Wagner into great fashion in the late thirties, here she is with a 1937 Hollywood film presentation of the first appearance in Die Walkure.

 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
That same year of 1937, Flagstad teamed up with Furtwangler and her regular Metropolitan tenor partner Lauritz Melchior in London at Covent Garden in a production of the Ring cycle. Exemplary conducting by Furtwangler, meditative and responsive to the musical content, Furtwangler understood the larger structure of expansive musical works.

My musical mentor, Dr. Philip Downs, explained to me in conversation that the Ring cycle was Wagner's greatest creation, involving the most complex and fully realized technique of leitmotiv transformations into a large-scale musical structure with a literary dramatic form.

Despite the political tensions of the day, this 1937 combination of Furtwangler with the supreme Wagner soprano was a unique achievement, not equaled until the 1950 La Scala performances with the same two performers.

 
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Dan Lobb

G.O.A.T.
Jon Vickers' fellow vocal student at the Toronto Conservatory, who shared the same vocal teacher, was Robert Goulet, and just as Vickers achieved his greatest Wagnerian fame in portraying two Arthurian Knights of the Round Table, Parsifal and Tristan, so did Goulet gain his fame portraying a third Knight of the Round Table, Lancelot.

 
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