ON MUSIC

I'm very interested in classical music from very old times to present time. I can play the piano (not too bad). For many years, I was the critic of classical music for El Periodico de Aragón in Zaragoza. I collaborated with the Auditorio de Zaragoza, writing program notes for some of their concerts. I've also collaborated with the now extinct Orquesta Clásica Universitaria of Zaragoza. I did some consulting for Al Ayre Español. All my activity related to music is finished.

Music you could try and enjoy Music you could try and en

My musical preferences wander quite a lot. Does anyone have favorite composers? It's difficult to say. These are composers I consistently enjoy. You will find a lot of British music here. As anyone who is serious about music, the triplet Bach-Mozart-Beethoven is present, but I put two appendices to make the great quintet of musicians of all times: Schumann and Sibelius.

• Johann Sebastian Bach.
• Jan Sibelius. His Seven Symphonies
• Ralph Vaughan Williams. His Nine Symphonies, and almost everything else.
• Benjamin Britten. His operas, for instance "Peter Grimes" and "Billy Budd"
• Robert Schumann. Absolutely everything in his music. Try "Genoveva", his only and masterful opera
• Arnold Bax. His somewhat rambling Seven Symphonies.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Everything, with an emphasis on his piano concertos and operas.
• Good old Beethoven sounds always so young.

Religious music

By religious music I’m meaning Christian based music, be it composed for liturgical use or for the concert room. I’m explicitly excluding chill-out or relaxing sounds and I’m so not interested by the charms of the East. I know liking this kind of music is essentially out of fashion (not to talk of the reasons for liking it), but from time to time it’s okay to be original, isn’t it?

• Frank Martin’s Golgotha. The most impressive rendering of the Passion composed in the XXth Century. Its calm recited style makes Golgotha the religious child of Debussy’s Pelléas. The scene at Gethsemane is simply hair-raising.
• Joseph Haydn’s early Nikolaimesse is small but perfect. The splendid Kyrie music is reused for the Agnus Dei, enclosing half an hour of the happy Catholic music of Haydn. Much bigger, much richer, much more dramatic and even more beautiful is the Nelsonmass (Missa in angustiis). This is the correct music to listen if you think that Haydn is predictable.
• César Franck’s The Blessings (Les Beatitudes) is his first masterwork. It is lush, romantic and deeply felt religious music from the second half of the XIXth Century, filling perfectly the gap from Berlioz to Elgar.
• Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, based on some writings of Cardinal Newman, talks of death and redemption, creating the best reincarnation of Wagnerian language in the world of oratorio. But if you really want to move on with Elgar, the real treat is The Kingdom, a pure excess of religious feeling.

Opera

Opera is a complicated musical genre, because it's supposed to be theatrical (I hate operas where nothing happens), but music should be good at the same time. Some of these operas get both sides of the problem

• Le nozze di Figaro, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, contains so many unforgettable moments that you cannot even begin to count them. With unsurpassable sense of theater, Mozart changes from really funny to poignantly emotional all the time.
• Sir John in Love, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. VW tried several times his hand with opera, not always successfully (his true mastery shows in his symphonies), but this little rendering of Falstaff’s mischiefs has wonderful melodies and a great sense of humour.
• Francesca da Rimini, by Sergei Rachmaninov, is a short one hour long opera, a story of guilty love, using some of the best of Rachmaninov’s music (which is a lot to say) in a dense atmosphere that owes to Rimski-Korsakov and therefore to Wagner.
• Parsifal, by the greatest of the great, Richard Wagner. I just got hooked into these solemn four hours of music. Just for musically grownups, however. Before I preferred Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Tristan und Isolde. Now, I cannot really tell.
• Salomé, possibly the most impressive opera of Richard Strauss. Violent beyond belief.
• Despite the huge charge of sentimentality, or maybe because of it, Puccini is my guilty pleasure. My all time favorite is Madama Butterfly. If you want to sound intellectual, you have to hate Puccini. He is way too easy!

Orchestral music

• Jan Sibelius composed many tone poems. Night ride and sunrise is one of the best. Of course, there’s a horse galloping. Then the day begins and you get one of the most inspired passages in all Sibelius’ music, a perfect mixture of slow and fast, with those intense huge brass chords that you have to feel to understand. More watery but equally epic is the abstract The Oceanides and for a real feeling of the Finn-thing you can try Luonnotar (a song or a tone poem?) or the breathtaking Tapiola.
• The vital and energetic music of Carl August Nielsen is a source of continuous amazement. A good beginning is the Fifth Symphony, before moving to the whole cycle of six. The overture Helios deals obviously with the sun, containing one of the longest melodic lines I’ve ever heard.
• William Walton's First Symphony is the great symphony of the British Isles. The amount of energy liberated in the first movement of that symphony can only be compared to Beethoven's Fifth.
• The first time I listened to the beginning of Edmund Rubbra's First Symphony, I realised there was a guy I was going to really enjoy. There's so much I like in his cycle of eleven symphonies that I prefer just to point you to the Third and Fourth, indisputable masterworks.
• Every time I listen to Claude Debussy's La mer, I am surprised to notice that I never get tired of it. Music for grown-ups, by the way.

Piano concertos

In addition to being good or not so good, music for piano (and especially concerts for piano and orchestra) needs the correct writing. Since the middle of the twentieth century, this seems to be a lost art. But the last part of the 19^th Century and the beginning of the 20^th have produced hundreds of hours of very well written piano music, part of it really good from a purely intellectual point of view.

• Moritz Moszkowski’s Piano Concerto has tons of notes, arpeggios, brash octave playing... and very good melodies. Extremely old-fashioned though.
• Sergei Prokofiev’s five piano concertos are always exciting and incredibly difficult to play. Concertos 1 to 3 are even athletic. (At the beginning of the third movement of Concerto nr. 2, can you hear an elephant?)
• Serguei Bortkiewicz’s 1st Piano Concerto is disorganised, deeply felt and almost naïf in its sheer sense of show. It’s what a classical Hollywood director would define as a piano concerto.
• The many Piano Concertos of Ignaz Moscheles are examples of brilliance and uncomplicated romanticism, perfect to enjoy the Viennese piano playing and the positive Beethovenian mood of the early romantic period.
• Among his piano concertos, Xaver Scharwenka’s Fourth is masterful in its piano writing and extremely convincing in structure and overall impression. Highly emotional in its way. The Third concerto is not to be missed either.
• Nikolai Medtner’s piano concertos. Add a great emphasis on the first movement of his third concerto, excellent if you want an example of what chromatic means. Rachmaninovian is a good word for this music. And Glazunov has a couple of very good concertos too. These Russians!
• A really enormous thing is Ferruccio Busoni's Piano Concerto, which lasts for one hour, where he tries to put it all, including a men's choir at the end.