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.
Today is Sergei Prokofiev's 119th birthday,I made a playlist of his complete works with opus number to celebrate the most popular composer of 20th century classical music. But since Chandos Records was mostly removed from Spotify for unknown reasons, this playlist is kind of broken. Please uncheck "Hide unplayable tracks" in Spotify's preference, otherwise you will only see some 700 tracks. Here's the list of works on wikipedia.
And here's the Spotify playlist: Sergei Prokofiev: Op. 1-135 (928 tracks, 2.6 days) Sorted by opus numbers. The picture above is the last known photo of the composer, taken in 1952. He died on March 5th, 1953, the very same day as Joseph Stalin.
Please leave a comment if you find substitutions for the removed Chandos albums or any works that I forgot to put in this playlist, thanks.
If you look for classical music in Spotify by searching "genre:classical", all you get is a bunch of film scores and ambient music. Before Spotify makes better navigation for its enormous classical library, we can try "label:nonclassical", you will find out that Sergei Prokofiev's grandson, Gabriel Prokofiev, is a composer who has written a concerto for turntables and premiered his string quartets in clubs.
Here's the Spotify playlist of the Label:NonClassical It includes G.Prokofiev's concerto and quartets. I put Sergei Prokofiev's two quartets at the end, as the most played 20th century classical composer, his chamber works always seems to be overshadowed by his keyboard and orchestral works. But to me his only two quartets, together with his majestic cello sonata, are among the very best of this genre.
Now back to the turntables once more, here's a video of Dr.Octagon's Blue Flowers(unavailable in Spotify), the twisted violin sampler is from the first movement of Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No.2. Magic.
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.
