Discover and share the masterpieces that forever enlarged the sphere of human experience accessible to the creative imagination, through the best instant streaming music service in the world, Spotify.
Two days into 2013, there are already 46 new classical albums on Spotify, ranging from Lisa Batiashvili's Brahms violin concerto, to a new recording of Rzewski's modern masterpiece The People United Will Never Be Defeated. To search and browse all the new releases more easily, you may want to subscribe to this 2013 New Classical Releases Index. It is a collaborative playlist and everyone can help to update it. A few rules to keep the playlist neat and useful:
1. One track per album. You can click album titles and browse full albums.
2. Add new tracks at the top of the playlist, so the new additions can be found easily.
3. Please avoid duplicated entries. Use the filter bar to check before adding. For example: before you add Peter Maxwell Davies – Maxwell Davies: Piano Concerto - Worldes Bli, you can press Ctrl (CMD) + F to bring out the filter bar, input partial title (like Davies piano) to see if the album is already in the playlist.
4. Only add newly recorded albums. No re-issues, re-packages or compilations of previously released material.
Get the regularly updated 2013 classical catalog in one Spotify playlist here. Ctrl (CMD) + G to browse in album view.
Thanks ferrisc for helping to update the 2012 playlist (which has 1521 albums by now). He has compiled a wonderful 2012 New Soundtrack Releases playlist that includes John Williams's Lincoln, Jonny Greenwood's The Master, Howard Shore's The Hobbit and dozens more.
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. - Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick's obsessive and perfectionist nature is wholly reflected in his choice of music for his films. Without the eerie Bartok and violent Penderecki music, Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance would only be a jumpy lunatic, but never a convincing and truly frightening psycho as we see in The Shining. The Handel theme perfectly indicate the implacable working of impersonal fate in Barry Lyndon. And, besides the famous use of Strauss and Ligeti in 2001, even the lesser known Gayane's Adagio from Khachaturian beautifully conveyed a lonely and mournful quality into the sections that introduce the spacemen aboard the Discovery One.
I compiled a playlist for the classical music used in five Kubrick films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. And subgrouped the music by films in chronological order, by inserting Wilco's 23 Seconds Of Silence. Here's the Spotify playlist: Classical Music Used In Stanley Kubrick Films (38 tracks, total time: 3 hours) And here's an interesting Q&A, including "Why did Kubrick use classical music for his films?"
Update: Great bargain on Amazon, 9 Kubrick films, 10 blue-ray disks for $63.
See the full list of classical music used in Stanley Kubrick films below:
Shostakovich: "Waltz 2" from Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra (often misidentified as the composer's Jazz Suite 2)
Ligeti: Musica Ricercata (2nd movement)
Liszt: Nuages Gris (Grey Clouds)
Mozart: Requiem (Rex Tremendae)
In the ritual, the incantations in the background are part of a Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy recorded in a church in Baia Mare, played backwards.
Inspired by Alex Ross' latest blog entryLo and Behold! I made a Spotify playlist of soundtracks and film scores.
It includes the soundtrack from Martin Scorsese’s new film “Shutter Island”. You can read about it on the page linked above. And Bernard Herrmann's classic scores for Hitchcock's Psycho and others, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Of course there are film scores by Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and Nino Rota's fascinating sonic landscapes and circus melodies for the Fellini films. Also included are Piero Piccioni’s score for Francesco Rosi’s Hand Over the City and Roberto Gerhard’s score for Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life. In the end there's Takemitsu's Suite from Akira Kurosawa's Ran, one of the most memorable films and scores ever.
I think most of the original films scores in this playlist, especially Gerhard and Takemitsu's, are modern masterpieces. By modern I mean constantly seeking new technique of expression and reinventing the musical language, not just bigger IMAX screen and more bombastic surrounding sound system. Yes I do enjoy Avatar, but as long as we live on planet earth rather than Pandora, I think it is better to spend more time on the works of art that intrigue us to think about our relationship with the real world, instead of hiding from the, admittedly not that good, reality. That's what Woody Allen films do, aren't they? So I also put a complication of classical music used in Woody Allen films in it.
I cannot find Giovanni Fusco’s score for Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. It's like the Pierrot Lunairein films, watch the extracts below. Nowadays they don't make films like this anymore, and no one can carve another Pietà either.
Why is Dmitri Shostakovitch the worst composer of the XXth century?Because he is the worst imitator of the twentieth century, imitator of Prokofiev and of Mahler and of Satie and of whoever else's scores he'd lay his paws on; and because his imitations are of poor quality, coarse, vulgar, thick, unimaginative, repetitive and narrow-minded: an artificious world he fabricated, imitated of the nineteenth century, in the image of the artificious society constructed by the Bolshevists.
You have successfully described John Williams!!!
OK, here's the Spotify playlist for Classical Music In The Films. I made this a collaborative playlist, so you can also add your favourite classical film scores and soundtracks into it. Looking forward to hear from you:)
Maybe everything that can be done HAS been done.
Maybe we are at a crossroads where art has exhausted itself as an imitation of life.
Maybe it is time, therefore, to allow life to become an imitation of art.
The art is in the living within our personal relationships: to reach out and touch another human soul as the great masters have touched us all.
If you want to share your playlist or just say hello, leave a comment or send me an email by clicking the image above. Thanks.
Greetings from the blogger
Hi everybody,
I am Chinese, 26 years old, have been listening to classical music for 6 years. I'm not a musician but work in the music industry, though one of my favourite quotes is Ives' "the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man, who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever."
In the beginning I saw the film Amadeus and was awed, then I began to build my collection started from Naxos' Mozart piano concertos. On my 20th birthday I got Bernstein's Mahler cycle with NYPO on Sony. Since then Mahler's nostalgia for a lost or never existed homeworld always moves me, you know that China is still going through the pain of a quick-paced modernization and I feel that things are changing so fast that it is almost impossible to identify myself with anything. Not many great classical concerts here in Beijing, last year I was lucky enough to attend Abbado's Mahler 4th and it will always be a very precious memory.
Recently I started to use the instant online streaming music service Spotify, it has a huge classical library, but it seems that very few people listen to classical on it. There are many Spotify playlist sharing sites, and many of them don't even have a classical section. So I started my own blog.
Besides the playlists I post, when I mention artists or recordings in the posts, most of the time I will link them to their Spotify ablums, so you can click through if you are interested.
I look forward to exchanging playlists and thoughts on classical music and other arts with you.
