Who’s my favorite composer? When I am asked this question, my answer may disappoint. “No one. don’t have a favorite composer.”
If the questioner looks crestfallen, I hasten to add, “From my teens until my early 30s, I did have a favorite composer, namely Sergei Prokofiev.”
But once my life as a music professor began, I focused on whatever music I taught. When the course was American Music History, my passions included Charles Ives, Stephen Foster, and Irving Berlin. When the semester schedule brought a course on opera, my all-consuming passion for opera meant that I didn’t care which operatic masterwork the class studied. I loved that work, that composer.
Still, I sometimes think about lists and favorites. My list changes all the time depending on my work and my mood. So any list I make would be artificial, and certainly temporary.
But okay, if I had to pick five works—just five to live with forever—what would they be?
1. Maurice Ravel, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G Major. Every note of this three-movement concerto is perfect. I mean that: it’s just perfect—utterly engaging, rhythmically compelling, crystalline and tender in its slow sections, and gorgeous in its overall effect.
2. Maurice Ravel, Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano. A far more reserved piece than the concerto described above, you might even call this trio ethereal. But if its slow movement doesn’t break your heart, please tell me how you managed it.
3. Ludwig van Beethoven, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 61. Beethoven took everything the classical concerto form could offer and power-packed it with harmonic cleverness, motivic invention, dramatic sweep, and an uncharacteristic amount of lyricism.
4. J.S. Bach, Jauchzet frohlocket (Opening Chorus to Part I of his Christmas Oratorio). I play a recording of this piece so often that I drive everyone in my household nuts. But I cannot help it. It’s impossible to hear this chorus and not want to dance around the room.
Hmm. I’m down to the last one and there’s so much that’s missing. Where is Chopin or Mozart or Schubert? Or Prokofiev, for that matter? But I have to say:
5. “Never, Never Land” from the 1954 musical Peter Pan (not Disney). Anyone can sing this song and bring me to tears. Happy tears. It touched me with its beauty and inspiring text when I was a little girl, and has never left my heart.
Clearly I’m leaving out vast swaths of . . . everything. But these are the five pieces I could dwell happily with forever, if there were no other music in my life, and be filled with joy.
My husband Hank’s list looks far different from mine. And he questioned whether my having two works by Ravel in a list of only five made sense or not. (It doesn’t, but so what?) He especially eschews favorites, but he gave me a list of five (no particular order) with the same caveats.
- Schubert, Die Winterreise
- Brahms, Clarinet Sonata No. 2
- Mahler, Symphony No. 4
- Stravinsky, Petrushka
- Rachmaninov, All-Night Vigil (Vespers)
I figured he would come up with something a bit more high-brow.
Of course, I want everything on his list and he wants everything on mine. We both want all the pieces we left out. Fortunately, we don’t have to choose. Western Culture has left us a musical treasure, more than enough to live with forever.
Now, send me your list. We can compare notes.
Right now I am engrossed with Mozart, the Requiem Mass and also his Great Mass in C minor with Maasaki Suzuki as conductor, they sound for all the world like mini operas to me.
Arvo Part , Kyrie and Triodion
Early music, I love Kyrie Orbus Factor by Ensemble Organum
Mass in C Minor and Requiem Mass by Mozart and conducted by Maasaki Suzuki
Kyrie Orbus Factor, by Ensemble Organum
Kyrie and Triodion by Arvo Part
These are my current favourites
We are not worthy but it’s such a great topic, I am compelled to share. It’s not just the tunes, it’s the context. Music and movement combined were key for me.
1. Original Soundtrack, Oklahoma!. Okay, so Ado Annie’s “I Cain’t Say No” is the one which possessed me as a five-year old watching on wooden benches at the outdoor movie shack in the California Sierra Nevada town called Twain Harte, but in truth I sing the whole musical in its entirety now—as I do several others—particularly in times of great stress or house cleaning. Which is annoying to family since I can’t really sing, hence loving Ado Annie. But I can dance, and this is where I learned to dance.
2. Darlene Love, Christmas, Baby Please Come Home. In fact the whole Phil Spector Christmas album. However, this one haunted me every day whilst pounding the mean pavements after a move to New York City. I had seen Darlene Love sing it live at the Bottom Line nightclub there and never was the same again. It was almost as if this song was calling me back home to San Francisco, which is where, in fact, I was to find my future husband.
3. Lawrence Welk, Calcutta. Huh? It’s an instrumental which was a #1 hit in December 1960, with piano and harpsichord at that. And the tune had been haunting me for years because it was a song they seemed to play always at the famous outdoor roller rink in Twain Harte, the ultimate roller rink organ sound. I could see the teenagers moving to it in my dreams but didn’t know the title. I hummed the tune for dozens of people for years but it was not successful . . . until making dinner one night for this guy who had joined the Ellie Greenwich Fan Club back in San Francisco. I hummed only the first few bars and he knew it immediately, stats and all. I knew that night we would be married. I never again would have to wonder about any piece of music. He had it all in his head, and in a famous 45 rpm collection.
4. The Flamingos, I Only Have Eyes For You. Are the stars out tonight? Goes with Calcutta, above. Dreams of doo wop on a starry summer night in Twain Harte, behind the lake where you have spent the afternoon in sandy beach bliss and sno cone heaven. Or works on the rooftops of steamy Manhattan as well.
I tell you, Twain Harte was magical. And then,
5. Mozart, Concerto for Flute, Harp & Orchestra in C major KV 299. This was a quality-looking LP I purchased when trying to impress myself in 1986, back when we could buy several vinyl records a week just for fun. I discovered that this piece simply feels like my soul. At least on good days. And I could dance to it. This LP I purchased along with Jean Pierre Rampal’s “Romantic Flute” that day. Both are with my collection of LPs which are stuffed on the bottom back shelf of my husband’s famous and extensive collection of vinyl, which is why I cannot name the actual LP right now. But that’s okay: he can pull out any song at a moment’s notice from this, so I don’t question his filing system.
My husband Brad’s Top 5. He insisted on keeping to your classical theme, despite being a pop music expert. Some of what he leaves out is: Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him” which he heard in1963 and it led him to memorize the Top 40 charts ever since; and perhaps the “Maverick” TV theme song which he knows by heart, since before the Top 40 there were 1950s/60s Westerns. Oh yes, and “Chapel of Love” by the Dixie Cups, to which we walked down the aisle in 1989, because our “Top 40 Godmother” Ellie Greenwich wrote it and we were perhaps the first in her Fan Club to get married. But that is another story.
1. Beethoven, Symphony #9.
2. Bach, Brandenburg Concertos No. 1-6.
3. Vivaldi, Double Mandolin Concerto in G Major.
4. Mike Oldfield, In Dulci Jubilo. In fact, this version is his very soul.
5. The Harp Consort, Planxty Connor, from Turlough O’Carolan’s “Carolan’s Harp,” which he discovered from Pandora’s Renaissance channel. Gets him going every time.
Thanks for asking, this was so much fun!