Listening to classical music on Spotify is a bit different than other genres. All the old composers being in the public domain is certainly how it should be but you don’t want to be ****ing with a goddamn high school talent show recital recording just because some dillweed’s soccer mom put it on there. So let’s take some very fundamental essential listening:
Johann Sebastian Bach
The Well-Tempered Clavier (
Das wohltemperierte Klavier or
Wohltemperirte Clavier) is a great place to start. What it is is Bach composed a piano piece for every major and minor key signature there is. The music is intricate and extremely logical. It’s extraordinarily grounded. Listening to it is psychologically pleasing in a way that’s kind of similar to acing a math test when you know you’re killing it. So if you wanna listen to Bach and you don’t know much about his music this a really good starting point.
András Schiff The Well-Tempered Clavier - JS Bach
Presently this entire collection is available for streaming on Spotify
You can identify great classical performers by their association with labels. Decca ain’t no ****ing joke so you know you’re safe. The thing is Schiff didn’t only record on Decca. Dafuq does that matter? So, and I get that it’s not rocket science, but you can search by Schiff’s name and check out whatever he recorded on whatever label. It’s all going to be good.
Schiff also has some interesting interviews on YouTube. He’s a 66 year old European dude who has a lot to say about the far right and fascism in Europe. And he also loves to talk about music.
Now it turns out there’s a great accompaniment to
The Well-Tempered Clavier
This dude
Wojciech Żywny taught
Frédéric Chopin using the The Well-Tempered Clavier as his material. It should be mentioned that for this music to be practice compositions was indeed originally Bach’s intention.
I feel like we owe it to Żywny to at least check him out so I dug this one up:
But anyway later Chopin would compose a series of preludes in the tradition of The Well-Tempered Clavier using the cycle of fifths instead of Bach’s chromatic approach. For this you wanna go here:
Chopin: Preludes; Sonata No.2
Martha Argerich
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Again you can run Martha Argerich through Spotify’s search engine and get a lot of results. She’s a 79 year old Argentine cancer survivor.
Also there’s nothing wrong with checking out new performances either. Generally the standard is super high (but not always)