Quote:
Originally Posted by Maestro Akhil Gardner
Be as honest as you can - Greatest must not mean Favourite (unless its Beethoven).  |
Most skilled: Mozart
Could do everything better than anyone else. For details, watch Amadeus and listen to the variety and beauty of the music in it. Sure the story's a bit fudged but the music is well used and beautifully performed by Neville Marriner's Academy of St Martin in the Fields.
It's incredible that the mind that touched on the most subtle of human emotion and showed us how music can express layers of feeling (some of the stuff in his opera's with multiple singers simultaneously singing different things but all making complete sense are utterly mind-blowing) produced this wonderfully crazed and demented sounding piece:
YouTube - Mozart - Adagio und Fuga
Most raw emotional impact: Handel
Invoked raw emotional highs and lows simply unmatched by anyone else. If music is about invoking intense emotions (sorrow, dread, elation, etc), then, perhaps Beethoven was right to say that Handel really is the greatest of all.
Lovely:
YouTube - Farinelli - Lascia ch'io Pianga
Another musical great who often gets overlooked is Vivaldi. Overall isnt in the same class but wrote some truly beautiful music:
Beautiful:
YouTube - Philippe Jaroussky - Vivaldi aria
ps.
I absolutely despise the use of thick, corn syrupy female voices in classical and earlier music. It sounds bad. I'll take a fake castrato who sounds half like a vacuum cleaner any day over that over-wrought super-vibrato nonsense (such as renee fleming, te kanawa, etc).