What is your favorite classical music?

What is your favorite period of classical music and why? What is your least favorite and why?

• What is your favorite period of classical music and why? What is your least favorite and why?For those who don't know: http://www.good-music-guide.com/articles/periods.htm Medieval Period - from about 800 to 1400 AD Dominated by church music. Gregorian chant or plainchant is typical. Monophonic refers to the fact that only one note is sung at one time. Renaissance Period - from 1400 to 1600 Still dominated by the church but with more sophisticated melodies and harmonies (polyphony). Different styles begin to emerge. Composers include Palestrina, Monteverdi and William Byrd. Baroque Period - from 1600 to 1750 Music flourishes in complexity, and scope. Instrumental music becomes dominant, and most major music forms become defined. Composers include Bach, Handel and Vivaldi. Classical Period - from 1750 to 1830 After flowering during the baroque, music now settles into several well-defined forms, following strict rules. The main forms being the sonata, the symphony and the concerto. Composers include Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven. Romantic period - from 1830 to WWI Music begins to break out of the classical strictness, and becomes more expressive and emotional. Rules get broken and new ideas develop. Composers include Brahms, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Twentieth Century While some composers on the twentieth century remained in the romantic style, most composers moved on. The only rule was that there are no rules. New music, new styles, new ideas. Composers include Bartok, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Ravel.

• Answer:

  Favourite: THE BAROQUE - I am including the very early period where Renaissance musical space and some practices still dominated, from around Monteverdi's works starting with the 5th book of Madrigals, and culminating in Gluck. I am also including the late days of the baroque where the Rococo and pre-Classical genres also flourished. Why? I'll give my top reasons: The concept that the performer is co-composer in the sense that the musical notation is intentionally naked and the performer must decide on phrasing, dynamics and ornamentation, is very appealing to me and to most modern performers. Every production of any piece is intrinsically different from another, even by the same performer! It is remarkably similar to the ideas behind jazz. In addition, it allows you to enjoy a piece many times over since some works can be performed so differently they feel like 2 different pieces. With later music, especially non-vocal, the variation between performances is so small that I personally tire of them quite easily. The musical content is a constant struggle between the awkward and mannerist (which is why Romantics christened this era as "Baroque") and delightful, pleasing and intensely emotional. If we take a piece by Handel (such as Theodora's aria "With darkness" from the eponymous opera) compared to a work like Mendelssohn's Violin concerto in E minor - both contain very emotional and even "schmaltzy" passages, but Mendelssohn being schmaltzy throughout compared to Handel's juxtaposition of pain and harmonic and textural "awkwardness" with sweetness and gentleness is more pleasing to me, and seems more challenging and engaging. The variation in music from place to place, composer to composer and era to era is staggering. We are only aware of a tiny percentage of the surviving works, the rest languish in manuscript, and they are so diverse it is a generalization bordering on lying to say that it all constitutes one era called baroque. In my experience, such diversity is not to be found in the classical and Romantic eras. Compare for instance Rameau's opera "Platée", and the aria "Aux langeurs d'Apollon" with the nearly contemporary "Orpheo ed Euridice' by Gluck, and I could give hundreds of examples more. Least favourite (and actively disliked): Modern, post-post-classic, neo-avant-garde or however you wish to call it. Anything that is produced by modern composers and only heard by other musicians and some unfortunates who subscribe to the Met or some other large philharmonics or opera houses that make a point of commissioning new work. The reason is simple: their notion of beauty, if indeed they had one during their process, is so drastically different from mine (and I believe most people's as well) that it cannot be viewed as anything else but ugly. Moreover, some works seem to relish tormenting the audience with their clever harmonic maneuvres or avant-garde musical tricks (such as have the singer decide on any modern pop style and mimick it, as in one recent Philip Glass piece). The music seems to be written with the audience either completely a nonentity in the composer's mind or with the audience as a body to be educated and lectured musically on their "uptightness" with tonal music. I could write forever about why the music is atrocious and why it does not succeed with the public, but a quote from Rossini seems to suffice: "Every kind of music is great except the kind that is boring."