“The complete Milhaud? Won’t you be holed up in a bunker for six months?” said a friend when I mentioned this project. If people know one thing about Darius Milhaud, it is that he was one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His catalogue includes 443 opus numbers, composed between 1910 and […]
Category: Rankings & Roundups
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Eight Unintentionally Funny Works of Classical Music
One of the great joys of getting to know classical music is learning to recognize how funny it can be. Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony may not seem like a particularly interesting piece the first time you hear it, but once you can appreciate the ways it subverts the conventions of classical development—the last movement razzes the […]
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I Listened to 31 Recordings of “Parsifal” in a Month
David Blaine sat in a Perspex box for 44 days. Sir Ranulph Fiennes crossed Antarctica on foot. When one isn’t athletically gifted, one’s endurance stunts must take a different form. So I listened to every recording of “Parsifal” on Spotify. Though “Parsifal” is Wagner’s slowest and oddest music-drama, I love it dearly, and I wanted […]
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Crisp Dinner
Picture the scene: Work finishes at 5, 5:30, maybe later. The concert starts at 7:30, and could go on for hours. What are you doing about eating? We asked people in the business of attending concerts exactly that. On the Whole Problem John Andrews, conductor Personally, I get ridiculously hangry if I don’t eat. I […]
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The Ten Most Annoying Musical Clichés, Ranked
Lord knows there’s plenty to complain about in the classical music “scene”: dorky advertising, pretentiousness, complacency, self-seriousness, and the sexy dances of opera. (Also, coughing in the quiet parts, filming the concerto on your iPhone, intermission selfies in flattering concert-hall mirrors, and clapping discourse.) But what about the musical things that bug us most? Here […]
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Augusta Holmès’s Most Virile Works, Ranked
Have you ever wondered why they call it the long 19th century? From Beethoven’s hammering martellatos, to Wagner’s massive, veiny works that seem to last forever, to Liszt’s immense hand size (…), the Romantic period was in many ways a musical virility contest with many—many—climaxes. But there was one composer who critics considered the most […]
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Every Maria Callas Role, Ranked
In honor of Maria Callas’s centennial (which, depending on who you ask, will be either this Saturday, Sunday, or Monday), Warner Classics has released “La Divina: Maria Callas in All Her Roles,” a ten-pound box set comprising 131 CDs (plus a handful of Blu-Rays). If you were to listen to all of these recordings—from the […]
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Rising to a Crescendo
When news broke of Martin Amis’s death in May, I ordered a copy of his essay collection The War Against Cliché, and set about learning how to write. As it turned out, some of the Amisian impulse to strike cliché from the page was already there. For the past few years, I have compiled my […]
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The Opera Fuckboy Matrix
What, exactly, is a fuckboy? When I asked people on what remains of classical Twitter to tell me about their favorite fuckboys in opera, the responses I received showed that, even after a nearly-decade-old debate around the word’s manifold meanings and usage, we’ve yet to reach a consensus. I’m not here to define the fuckboy. […]
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Every Bach Cantata, Ranked
After ranking the complete Scarlatti sonatas and Schubert songs, you might think I’d have learned my lesson, both in time spent and in baffled—or worse—reactions received. Still, I admit when I decided to take on ranking the complete Bach Cantatas, I was a little naive about the time commitment required. With fairly regular listening, this […]