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    So Chopin then

    I'm just listening to a CD from the library by someone called Alexei Lubimov of "Ballades", although there's no singing involved. It's good, very varied, from pretty near-scales to some more dissonant (that word again) stuff.

    Any other Chopin tips?

    edit- Nothing too obvious for a novice like me.

    #2
    So Chopin then

    Are you borrowing these from the library?

    If so, see if they have the Maurizio Pollini collection of Etudes/Preludes/Polonaises for Deutsche Grammophon. If you think you might like something more "impressionistic", go for the Nocturnes.

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      #3
      So Chopin then

      Chris, just get any chopin compilation you can lay your hands on. It's mostly gold. or if you're into limewire or somesuch, just download a bucket of the stuff, and listen to it again and again. some of it is accessible from the first listen, and a lot of it needs a couple of goes but is well worth it.

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        #4
        So Chopin then

        I used to find Chopin a bit saccharine until my ears were opened to him by reading Douglas Hofstadter's articles in Metamagical Themas. I realised that I'd been listening only at the very surface.

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          #5
          So Chopin then

          What do you mean saccharine? Too sweet? Sounds much less so than Mozart, at first listen.

          I've just got hold of the Nocturnes by Claudio Arrau. He did some good Beethoven sonatas.

          What is impressionism in music? We were doing Whistler the other week and he used to call paintings "nocturns". I'd never heard a nocturn but I felt I could connect his paintings with music, Board of Canada type stuff, as it happens.

          Now I hear a real nocturn then it doesn't quite fit with Whistler. Funny.

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            #6
            So Chopin then

            Yes, too sweet. Superficially, Mozart seems sweet because he sort of conforms to expectations - the rules that he's working with are designed to please the ear, and we works within them brilliantly, whereas with Chopin the first impression is that he goes out of his way to coat his music with sugar. He too was doing this starting from the conventionalities of his time, but there was much more scope for choice in Chopin's Romantic era than in Mozart's Classical one, and the presentational choices made by Chopin generally seem to be to put a rather thick gloss on things.

            Speaking very subjectively, of course.

            In very hand-waving terms, I'd describe imprssionism in music as a striving to convey or, perhaps better, to suggest effects in the outside world - often ephemeral effects - and the composesr's reaction to those effects, leading to an emphasis on sonority over stucture. I guess that's a one-sentence stab at a description that could be improved upon at length.

            (Edit - by "sonority" I mean tonal effects, not sonorousness.)

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              #7
              So Chopin then

              That's making some sense. Who is the best unsaccharine composer from this era then? Debussy?

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                #8
                So Chopin then

                Debussy's terrific, I reckon.

                I find the composers that can loosely grouped as Impressionistic, centered (like, I guess, Impressionism in art) around the French masters Debussy and Ravel, but not confined to that nationality, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries markedly less sentimental than their predecessors - among whom I'd number Chopin.

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                  #9
                  So Chopin then

                  I'd not thought of Ravel, thanks. The periods are falling into place for me.

                  In the meantime, 5 mins of Chopin on BBC4 tonight- we don't have it unfortunately.
                  http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/whatson/prog_parse.cgi?filename=20080418/20080418_1930_4544_15849_5

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