The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection: Second Edition, Revised and Updated - Softcover

Libbey, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0761104879 ISBN 13: 9780761104872

Publisher: Workman Publishing Company, 1999

Synopsis

Berlioz. Vaughan Williams. Schubert and Schumann. Mozart after the Jupiter Symphony, Bach beyond the Brandenburg Concertos, opera after The Magic Flute. In his informed and indispensible guide with over 157,000 copies in print, National Public Radio's Ted Libbey takes listeners by the hand through the classical repertory to build a music library. For the second edition, with five years of new performances to consider, five years of new releases to review, and five years of reissues to re-evaluate-the author has completely revised and updated the book.

While sticking to the essential 300 works, there are now one-third new selections and reviews, and a 50% change in discography to keep all suggested CDs up to date. The NPR Guide tp Building a Classical CD Collection will make every music lover's core collection complete.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Libbey is one of America's most highly regarded music critics. A former music critic for The New York Times, he is known to millions of NPR listeners as curator of the Basic Radio Library on "Performance Today." Mr. Libbey is now Director of Media Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.

From the Back Cover

Where Do You Go After Mozart's Jupiter? After Bach's Brandenburg Concertos? After Beethoven's Third?

In this informed and indispensable guide, now in a second edition featuring a hundred new recordings, National Public Radio's Ted Libbey takes you by the hand through the classical repertory and helps you build an essential CD collection. Not just another rating book, this is a foremost expert's thoughtful and entertaining appreciation--work by work, performer by performer, recording by recording--of the symphonies, concertos, chamber pieces, keyboard works, sacred works, and operas that belong in every music lover's library. It includes the core 20 works for starting out, recommendations especially suited for young listeners, and an appendix listing additional works, beyond those covered in the first edition, that the author feels most passionate about.

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION:

"I have been lost in this book for a week...Libbey('s) comparisons are wonders of lucidity, differentiation, and those 'open ears' Rostropovich spoke of." --Chicago Tribune

"An extensive guide and perfect companion to the basic classical repertory." --Digby Diehl, Playboy Magazine

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Samuel Barber

Adagio for Strings

On the programs of American symphony orchestras, the American composer whose music is most frequently encountered is not Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, or George Gershwin, but Samuel Barber (1910-1981). For many years, Barber's Adagio for Strings has been the most frequently performed concert work by an American composer. This intense, elegiac piece was originally the opening part of the second movement of Barber's String Quartet, Op. 11; the composer then scored it for string orchestra at the request of conductor Arturo Toscanini, who gave the first performance of the arrangement in 1938 with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The music begins quietly with a feeling of subdued but deep sadness, builds to a searing climax of extreme poignancy, and subsides again into the stark, melancholy mood of its opening.

Though familiar from repeated playings (and from use in Oliver Stone's film Platoon), the Adagio for Strings remains one of the most moving and beautiful elegies ever conceived, an outstanding example of Barber's remarkable lyric gift.

Recommended Recordings

New York Philharmonic/Thomas Schippers.

Sony Classical "Masterworks Heritage" MHK 62837 [with other works by Barber, Menotti, Berg, and D'Indy]

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Slatkin.

EMI CDC 49463 [with Overture to The School for Scandal, Essays Nos. 1-3 for Orchestra, and Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance]

The most beautiful recording ever made of the Adagio for Strings is at last on CD, thoughtfully coupled with some of the other recordings the young Thomas Schippers made for Columbia Masterworks-of the music of Barber and others-between 1960 and 1965, at the start of his all-to-brief career. Although he was never on close personal terms with Barber, Schippers had the ability to put Barber's music across in just the right way, with the perfect blend of energy and lyricism, toughness and warmth, and, above all, with the feeling that its sentiment was real, but ineffably contained. The playing of the New York Philharmonic (in the Adagio, as well as in the Second Essay for orchestra, the Overture to The School for Scandal, Andromache's Farewell, and Medea's Dance of Vengeance) is aglow with inspiration, and the sound is exceptionally vivid, with a palpable sense of presence and space.

For the essential orchestral pieces of Barber, EMI's compilation with Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony is the best currently available. Slatkin's reading of the Adagio is beautifully built, exactly on the mark. The Essays-works of magnificent crafstmanship in which Barber unerringly balanced the sorrowful with the triumphant-are powerfully stated, and Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance emerges as an orchestral tour de force. The recordings are full, spacious, superbly atmospheric.

Edition details

• Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0761104879
• ISBN 13: 9780761104872
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 536