Hello all. It is wonderful to see so many composers' names mentioned. I would just add a few. Names I haven't seen mentioned but written some of the most amazing music: Faure, Respighi (sp?) Massenet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokoffief.

Shostakovich is one of my favorites. How he survived under Stalin and still managed to produce "political music" was just short of miraculous. Then again, that's just my opinion.

Hi Clavis, I'm not sure if Shostakovich is underrated, I'm a big fan of his music and like you I respect him for being a voice of culture and hope and for producing great work under the most difficult conditions. There's a little history text in one of his symphonies, the 1905 I think, where he attends the premier of the work and afterwards Leonid Brezhnev asks..."How come you don't write happy joyful music? Of course the ruling party officials didn't realize that Dmitri was using his music to protest the internal struggle going on in his beloved Russia. He had many opportunities to defect to the west, but he always returned home to continue his composing, plus he was a true Russian patriot, so despite being at odds with the politicians he still cared for his people too much to abandon them completely. Anyway, he was very popular in the 50's and 60's but you may be right that not as many people value his great legacy today.

Vivaldi gets no respect for someone who wrote some of the most beautiful and influential music of his era.

I know he is well known to hardcore fans of classical music, but outside of that?

Probably Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. Underrated all of them.

I'm not sure I understand why you chose 3 of the most famous well known composers as underrated?? Are you saying because you like them so much that other people value them less than you do? Or that your contemporaries don't know and recognize their colossal contributions to the music that we enjoy even centuries later?

Sarcasm.

:laughing:, Okay sarcasm it is, figures the one obvious possibility and I didn't suggest it. Sarcasm aside Do you have a composer you think is underrated, or are you just having some fun with us classical music fans?;)

I don't know. I'm not heavily into classical, and though I really like Chopin, he's underrated to the general public but most classical music fans know Chopin.

I agree. I had to put up with my pianist friend shoving Chopin and Listzt down my throat every chance he could, but they finally began to grow on me. Chopin's piano compositions are fairly schismatic but entertaining all the same to listen to. I think Handel is up there too, a lotta people disregard him because he was a religious fanatic but he was truly a great composer.

I dont know if I would call him underrated, because in the classical guitar realm he's known. But outside of classical guitarists not many do, so I'm gonna go with Leo Brouwer.