Check out this YouTube clip of André Previn and the NHK Symphony Orchestra performing the first part of the third movement of the second symphony.  I don’t feel bad that I don’t get it, because I know that if I am not getting my ecstatic experience from Rachy, I can get it elsewhere.

For me Rachmaninov (to paraphrase Bugs Bunny) made the wrong turn at Albuquerque after Tchaikovsky.   Tchaikovsky had gone far enough in the direction of sweet indulgence.   For me, we did not need to go further.  So I have found myself taking the other turn with Schoenberg and Shostakovich.

Curiously, I am able to find a parallel with my personal experience with rock music history.  Just as I felt rather sickened by the early 80s rock of groups like Foreigner and Toto (the Rachmaninovs of rock, if you will) I found my way in their diametric punkish counterparts, Black Flag, the Butthole Surfers and Dead Kennedys.  Bands who felt and expressed angst darkly both with radical sound and the occasional touch of humor.  This is how I found Shostakovich and my way into the angst-expressive side of the classical music tradition.

I realize that I am swimming against the tide here.  Rachmaninov is music for the people, as is proven over and over again by the borrowing of his melodies by pop and soundtrack composers and was demonstrated again that night at the New York Philharmonic when the audience jumped to their feet with ecstatic applause.  My ecstasy happens to lie in the grit.  The clouds that threaten the sunset.  The bitterness in that chocolate cake.

This is strictly a matter of taste as Rachmaninov was not expressing an easy life through his music.  Quite the contrary, he was expressing what he felt was the antidote to hardship.  Yet many of us seek a more homeopathic (“like cures like”) approach to our antidotes.  And the chief procurer of alternative music at the time was Arnold Schoenberg.

Around the time Rachmaninov wrote his second symphony (1906-7), Schoenberg wrote his Chamber Symphony No. 1, which is a work that takes the left turn at Albuquerque.  It emerges strongly from the world of romantic music, lush and large minded, but rhythmically and tonally it begins to stray and quest, to murmur and complain that we need change to face the challenges of a new era.

This brief segment of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 played with ferocity by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic might just get you on your feet and wanting more:

Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 turns the sound world of Mahler in upon itself almost jazzily playing off of Mahlerian seriousness.  Yet it is not without its great climatic moments.   The work has five movements, but is meant to be played without pause and near the end of fourth movement Schoenberg creates a beautifully balanced apotheosis, which tracing its way back through the humor and lightness of the works beginning opens the way to a triumphant finale.

Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 is characterized by its sweeping and saccharine (to me) melodies and is thus a very different work than Schoenberg’s funky Chamber Symphony.    But Schoenberg can ‘do lush’ as good as anyone and better than many, although his hues tend much more to dark red and indigo than light blue and pink.  One of the greatest examples of lush Schoenberg is his famous tone poem Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which happens to sit very high on my personal list of ecstatic masterpieces.

Verklaerte Nacht is an earlier work written when Schoenberg was even more under the influence of the Romantics, particularly Wagner.   At the time he composed it, Schoenberg was caught in a romantic spell with Mathilde von Zemlinsky, whom he would later marry.   Verklaerte Nacht conveys all the uncertainty and swelling thrill of new love.   Yet even as it ends happily there are the strains of suffering that cloud and color that happiness.

In this YouTube clip from a Live From Lincoln Center telecast, Arnaud Sussmann, Erin Keefe, David Kim, Teng Li, David Finckel, and Priscilla Lee give us a nice sampling of the piece:

In the early 1920s, Dmitri Shostakovich began to compose some of the most exciting, radically charged symphonies of the 20^th century.   His symphonies will find many places in the Ecstatic Livingroom, but I will just sight his first symphony here as an antidote to Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2.

Shostakovich’s works are very lyrical, but he deploys force and atonal wallops like no other composer.    It is perfect transitional music from hard rock to symphonic music, if you are so inclined.    Shostakovich’s first symphony is a great introduction to his symphonic output.  At around 30 minutes, it’s a relatively brief listen and offers many of the trademark Shostakovich elements.    It begins innocently and easily enough with a few hummable tunes, but by the second movement those tunes have begun to morph into huge, explosive expressions of awe and fear.  It is a journey through beautiful lyrical moments and unspeakable fear, which ends in a thrilling climax. Shostakovich was only 19 when he completed this symphony and it is relatively easy going, compared to what was to come.   Even so, I cannot imagine what the first audience to have heard his Symphony No. 1, must have felt.

Here is a clip of Valery Gergiev, one of the world’s greatest interpreters of this repertoire, leading the London Symphony Orchestra in the finale:

This is music that gets me jumping up and down and often when I hear it live in concert halls, I look around and wonder how everyone can just sit there so apparently calm and not feel the need to get up and move!   This was of course, one of the reasons we created the Ecstatic Living room.  So we could just let go and do what we want to the music that we love.

This post was inspired by my personal inability to find the ecstatic experience in Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2, but it’s not meant to be a full-on put down of Rachmaninov.  He wrote some great ecstatic works, including his final piece, the Symphonic Dances, which is absolutely rocking.    But we’ll leave that for another time…..

And in case you’re interested, here are a few recommended recordings of these pieces:

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Buy on Amazon
Buy on iTunes

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Buy on Amazon

In 2009, the world celebrated the bicentennial of Haydn’s death (he was born in 1732 and died in 1809), but I don’t think he received the kind of shout out that he deserved.  Chatting with artists and writers I work with, I have yet to find one person who doesn’t like “Papa” Haydn’s music, even if it has never been as well-known as Mozart’s (Mozart, it should be pointed out, revered the elder composer and his music and dedicated a set of string quartets to him).  A writer friend of mine compared Mozart to a smoothly paved road noting that, by comparison, Haydn’s music was more like a scenic country road – bumps and all.

Haydn spent much of his creative life on the country estate of his patrons, the wealthy Hungarian Esterházy family, and in that relative isolation he said that he was “forced to become original.” Lucky for us! Haydn nonetheless achieved fame across the continent, especially in London where his two extended visits met with an enormous outpouring of public affection.  It’s no exaggeration to say that in in his two trips there he was greeted and treated like a rock star.

I’ve been a bit of a Haydn junkie since first discovering his music 25 years ago.  The reasons are pretty simple: the world can be a fairly rotten place, but Haydn’s music is exactly the opposite – it’s charming, earthy, (mostly) joyous, imaginative, clever and inexhaustibly fresh. Heck, it’s even fun.

If I had to pick one genre of Haydn works for my desert island I’d go with the symphonies. Our panel of experts below tell you a bit about their favorites (responses are in alphabetical order, to avoid bruised egos!), and some recommended recordings follow that.

Marin Alsop, conductor (music director, Baltimore Symphony): Choosing a
favorite Haydn Symphony is a bit like choosing your favorite child. I love Symphony No. 49, La Passione. It breaks ALL the rules and foreshadows the Romantic revolution around the next bend! Extremely emotive and moving!

Leif Ove Andsnes, pianist: I love the “Clock” Symphony, No. 101. The first movement is one of the deepest and at the same time most joyful pieces he ever wrote. The serenity of the opening, then when it turns to major in the Allegro section – such an exploratory atmosphere! The themes and rhythms are exhilarating.

Here is a YouTube video of Sir Roger Norrington conducting the first movement of Haydn’s “Clock” Symphony.

Jonathan Biss, pianist: If I’m forced to name a favorite Haydn Symphony, it’ll have to be No. 102. In terms of invention, it is probably no more remarkable than any of the great symphonies, and while its humor runs the gamut from the urbane to the slapstick, others are more uproarious. What makes 102 unique is the stunning, almost ostentatious use of orchestral color. From the florid cello obbligato in the slow movement, to the timpani rumbles that decorate runs in the finale, I can think of no other work where he exploited the possibilities of the orchestra in such a unique fashion.

Leon Botstein, conductor (music director American Symphony and Jerusalem Symphony): There’s no such thing as a bad Haydn Symphony, but I’m especially fond of the late ones – Nos. 98, 99, 100, 102. These have all the complexity, drama and imagination that are the hallmarks of mature Haydn.

Jeremy Geffen, artistic administrator (Carnegie Hall): Symphony No. 99 in E-flat major. I heard this symphony first while a viola student at USC. At that time, as now, the piece seemed bursting with distilled joy – a Falstaffian humanity. Every time I hear the work I feel as if it is the first day of spring, and think of the wonder of that first encounter.

Alan Gilbert, conductor (music-director designate, New York Philharmonic): How about 48, 45, 90, 99 and 103 for starters? These are just a few that would make my list as I don’t particularly feel like choosing one over the other! Among his other incredible qualities, Haydn’s ability to write a last movement like nobody’s business puts him in a category all his own.

Paavo Järvi, conductor (music director, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra): When I think about Haydn I think of my Dad. We played four-hands symphonies since I was ten, paying from the score! I love Haydn and Johann Strauss and both of them make me think of my father. Of all of the Haydn Symphonies that I love – and I love them all – I’ll choose No. 82, “The Bear,” which I recently conducted. I can’t help to think how wrong people are to think of Haydn as slightly gray and not exciting and a bit pedestrian. I can’t understand that reputation! His music is insanely entertaining. His music is like the orchestra bursting out laughing, but, at the same time, it’s perfection! Mozart and Beethoven called him Pape for a reason: you don’t call just anyone Papa!

Alex Ross, New Yorker critic: I’m partial to Haydn’s “Sturm und Drang symphonies, and especially the “Trauersymphonie.” The main theme of the first movement – rising fifth, rising fourth, falling semitone – is a rather scary entity, somehow putting me in mind of a gallows. Haydn spins out a customarily elegant argument from the idea, but it retains its threatening edge.

David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer critic: Symphony No. 100, “Military.” I love all of them because they so cleverly continue their thematic development in all regions of any given movement, and that’s definitely the case here. Also, Haydn was a creature of his own empire, so marches and such were a part of his landscape. And in second movement of this symphony, it’s so clever the way he turns a military march into high art – but without any undue grandeur or pretention. I believe the form is theme and variations. My favorite recording is Eugen Jochum with the London Phil on DG. But I hope that Roger Norrington will take it on soon, because I think he’s maybe the best Haydn conductor alive.

Howard Kissel, New York Daily News blogger and actor: Symphony No. 88: It has a gravity that reminds you he was Beethoven’s teacher, but a levity that reminds you he is Haydn.

Some box set recommendations:

If you have to own them all (and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from doing so), conductor Adam Fischer’s complete set does not disappoint, and is available in a lovely budget-priced boxed set from Brilliant Classics.

Haydn’s so-called “Sturm und Drang” (meaning “storm and stress” and related to a pre-Romantic literary movement emphasizing creativity inspired more by more personal, subjective feelings than reason) symphonies are very colorful, diverse and sometimes even a bit strange. Trevor Pinnock’s budget-priced set with the English Concert is always lively and vividly recorded.

Haydn’s most famous works, the so-called “Paris” Symphonies and “London” Symphonies are fabulously entertaining from first note to the last. Conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt is masterful in the former; and Eugen Jochum is full of character with the latter.

Symphonies 73 – 75: I absolutely love “La Chasse” (The Chase – no. 73), especially the opening movement. Roy Goodman and the Hanover Band have a great one.

Sir Charles Mackerras and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s kick up some dirt with their rousing performances. Either 101 and 104, “London” or 100, “Military” and 104, “Drumroll” will do the trick.

For a terrific and handsomely-produced introduction to Haydn and his music, Harmonia Mundi’s “Haydn Celebration” (book + 2 CDs) features many photos and illustrations and a not-too-long biographical essay about Haydn’s life and works.