(The complete list.)
8. Chopin
The quintessential lone pianist exploring his soul through the instrument. The most intimate and introverted of the greats.
Some of the most characteristically Chopinesque pieces are his 58 Mazurkas. (A mazurka is a traditional Polish folk dance that might have been fairly obscure if not for Chopin.) Here's one of them, played by Vladimir Horowitz:
Here's Andras Shiff playing the first 7 of the 24 Preludes:
7. Schubert
Impossible to neatly label or summarize. Is he Classical or Romantic or what? Who cares? His body of work is fascinatingly varied and staggeringly huge, yet he died at only 31 — a terrible loss to music.
He's perhaps best known for his over 600 songs (by which I of course mean the traditional sense — "short pieces that are sung" — not the iPod sense of "tracks from an album"). But I'm more interested in classical music without vocals, so here are a few of my favorites:
Schubert's 5th Symphony is like the best Mozart symphony Mozart never wrote. He was only 19 when he wrote this. Here's the first movement (conducted by Gunter Wand):
His String Quintet (for the unusual lineup of string quartet plus an extra cello, instead of an extra viola) is at the highest level of any chamber music by anyone. It was his last instrumental composition, written just two months before he died. Here's the second movement (split into two videos, with an abrupt shift happening at the beginning of the second):
I had lent a few CDs to a friend who was getting into classical music, and he brought up the last movement of the "Trout" Quintet (which also has an unusual lineup: piano, violin, viola, cello, and double-bass). I've talked before about how it's the rare piece of music that gives me a strong feeling of: "Aha, this is it!" My friend essentially told me he felt that way about the "Trout" finale. So do I, and here it is:
The "Unfinished" Symphony has a profound sense of completeness. The first movement, conducted by Leonard Bernstein:
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