Pieces of Classical music Alan Bennett never wants to hear again ...

The last two choices are obviously dumb. Can't disagree with the first three though.


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I can't hear the violin solos in Scheherazade without thinking of this: https://t.co/c6SI7aUc7W




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Heard Scheherazade at a Christmas Eve concert and have been humming it ever since.

I hope Bennett will get over it (and himself, but I doubt it). At one point, eons ago, I decided I hated Handel's Messiah, esp. the Hallelujah Chorus. After years of avoiding it, I went to a Christmas season concert with My Lovely Wife and had a spiritual experience. Now, a live concert every Xmas season (and we went once during Easter) is a family tradition.

You will part me from my Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

mf

“I know that, in spite of the poets, youth is not the happiest season"

I'd be ok to never hear any of those again. I can handle the last movement of the RK every few years or so (the Reiner recording of course!).

I've never heard an interesting Schubert symphony & the 5th is indeed excruciatingly dull.

I hate the Pastoral, well most of it.

I've never understood why people like Pictures, piano or orchestral version. I think it's one of those pieces where people forget that the famous openings to some of the movements are about as interesting as those movements get. The final Great Gate outing is perhaps one of the most soporific & seemingly interminable passages of music I can think of.

I think there may a couple of occasions between now & death where Mozart's 40th would be welcome...there's just too much quality in it - despite its hackneyed feel - to ignore as easily as the rest.

I suppose this is the wrong time to add to Mr Bennett's (my uncle was at university with him, don't you know!) list, especially as the list would be so very long, but I'll throw in 'any piece by Dvorak, any opera by Donizetti, Rossini, Bizet, Bellini, Offenbach, Gounod, & Bruch's Scottish Fantasy'... what about you?

So.... what do you like?

Anything scored for slide rule and pocket calculator.

stfu about fking avatars already.

fud-slush likes Wagner. Hey, on that note, fud: is there anything by Wagner, post-Rienzi, that you DON'T like?


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There's a difference between disliking pieces because they're overplayed vs. disliking them for being of poor quality.

I try not to think badly something just because it's overplayed, I'm not going to let the fact that a few bars from Beethoven's 5th or 9th have been used to sell everything from laundry detergent to tires interfere with my enjoyment of the music.

In contrast, there are other pieces that are both overplayed and just not very good. Bennett's complaint can't seem to distinguish between the two, since it lumps Mozart's 40th into the same category as Pictures at an Exhibition.