Brahms

Rachmaninoff is better.

To be honest I haven't listened to enough Brahms to give a proper opinion, but I must admit that I have never liked anything I heard by the guy... :)

To be honest I haven't listened to enough Brahms to give a proper opinion, but I must admit that I have never liked anything I heard by the guy... :w00t:

:)

You haven't listenen to enough Brahms?!

Get his 3rd symphony *drools*

Hi, Mark. - The 4th is pretty good too!

Let's face it, he was a perfectionist. (And rude enough to drop off to sleep and snore while Liszt was playing.)

The god of chamber music to me

what is he to you?

At one time Brahms played his music for Richard Wagner.

Wagner commented, "Herr Brahms performed some variations on the piano for me today, it was quite acceptable"!

At one time Brahms played his music for Richard Wagner.

Wagner commented, "Herr Brahms performed some variations on the piano for me today, it was quite acceptable"!

He was very lucky to get that much of a compliment. Wagner was teh badass.

Don't take that to mean Wagner liked Brahms; there was quite the feud not necessarily between them but between their respective followers. Brahms wasn't so interesting in quarreling and as one of the pioneers of musicology he even requested a score from Wagner, which was given but very soon taken back on a pretty sour note. Wagner really bought into the whole argument between the 'new' and the 'old' parties (a critic called it the sunshine of Wagner versus the "Brahmsian fog", suggesting something that's lighter and more direct and cutting versus something more collected and intellectual). That quote must've been early, I can't imagine Wagner saying anything like that later in Brahms's life.

Hit or miss. I love the Requiem. But mostly what I think is that he is overdone, overblown, too big, his compositions are infatuated with themselves,

Likely I'm biased because my dad's a Brahms scholar but in my opinion, the later you go with Brahms the better it gets. If you consider that his early works were very directly impacted by the notion that he was the 'next Beethoven', there's a certain obligation to aim big. You can imagine the poor guy, afraid to death to write a symphony until it's as good as Beethoven (and obviously, if you ask me, when he tried he succeeded). Once you get to things like his Clarinet Trio op. 114 or the piano pieces op. 118, there's nothing not to like. I mean, this is all subjective obviously, but I think that from where Brahms is coming from there's almost a certain modesty compared to just about any other composer at that time.