[AfterHours]

Recently revisited...

3 of the greatest works of music (or any art) ever...

And these have held long at the very top of my recommended recordings of each ... I've had them as the only 10s for "performance quality" of these works for years (which also means they've held the top spot above the competition which is very fierce in these works, having listened to many, many others ... Mahler's 9th and Mass in B are especially blessed with lots of top notch recordings ... Beethoven's 9th has a gazillion recordings and quite a few excellent ones too, but not as many that are very top tier because so many conductors overly flat-out ignore the tempo markings, losing intensity, tension, impact, climax, and too many ignore the forces required to muster enough impact/emotion, which Beethoven was clearly calling for no matter what was typical/available in his own time with period instruments and so forth -- just like pianos of his time would tend to break under the pressure of a proper Hammerklavier sonata; again, he is clearly calling for a stronger, more powerful instrument just as in Beethoven's 9th he is clearly calling for orchestration, instrumentation, beyond the normal capabilities/limits and, in the finale, beyond the typical voices of the time too)

Also, it's very easy to confuse my top selection in each of these with another recording by these conductors (with multiple recordings of these), so without further ado...


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I do intend to update my Classical page in similar format as I've done with the Paintings, Sculpture, Architecture page; that is, instead of having the "Recordings" section on only 3 pages, which isn't all that user-friendly, I'm going to have an "artist page" for each composer featured where you can just click a link to that to find their selections alone on their own post.
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