On Aug 5, 2013, at 5:51 PM, Edward Mast <nedma...@aol.com> wrote: > Disdain for either early or later music is foolish. Duke Ellington is > reputed to have said: "There are only two kinds of music; good music and bad > music".
And since no two persons will ever agree on which is which in every case, this might be the most useless comment ever made on any subject. While I think Ellington was (reputedly) talking gibberish, I second Edward's point. In particular, I don't know why anyone who's heard three minutes of his music would want to trash Brahms -- who, by the way, was one of the great early music pioneers of his age. He was a collector of pre-Baroque music, directed public performances of music by Gabrieli and Schütz with his choir, and published an edition of Couperin. He was also a genius, whose music has benefited, I think, from the attentions of HIP performers. If you're a diehard HIP/period instrument person (and hey, who isn't?), there are a good number of HIP Brahms recordings: for starters, the symphonies and German Requiem by Norrington and Gardiner, the serenades by Spering/Capella Augustina, the string sextets by Monica Huggett's Hausmusik, the piano music by Hardy Rittner and Jan Michels, and the violin sonatas and horn trio by Isabelle and Alexander Melnikov. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
