Top five composers revisited

Posted on 07.27.09

During the interval of the opening night of the proms last week, a friend got me thinking.

If pressed for my favourite 5 composers, I can state them without hesitation, and they’ve been fairly consistent for a while now.

1. Rachmaninov
2. Poulenc
3. Purcell
4. Vaughan-Williams
5. Mozart

(in no particular order)

If pushed, I could happily survive on a diet of those five composers for the rest of my life.

But then I thought… what about the next five? How would I choose my top ten?

First up – nothing German in the top 5, so we better put that right. But frankly it’s not likely to be any of the obvious choices, any of the ‘greats’. It’s not as if I don’t like Bach, Brahms and Beethoven — indeed some of their works are amongst my favourite (for example, my top-five desert island discs would include Bach B minor for sure) but I don’t like them consistently enough to give them such exalted ranking.

On the other hand, there’s Richard Strauss. He eminently fits my critieria for top-five composers. (And what is that, pray, Mr Reader?)

1. everything I already know is solid gold, can’t imagine the music not existing etc
2. new discoveries never disappoint, but enhance my approval

And therefore Strauss, with his 4 Last Songs and Der Rosenkavalier ticking box (1) and the Alpine Symphony, Metamorphosen and Tod und Verklarung ticking box (2), is in fact only narrowly edged out of my top-top five.

And then there’d have to be more English music… but how can I choose between Elgar, Finzi, Britten, Walton and Howells? Parry, even!

Well, another of my criteria is that they have to have had a wide range of music ouput. Howells therefore, with his predominantly choral ouevre probably isn’t going to make the grade. Elgar on the other hand is to me is a composer whose diversity of output – chamber, symphonies, concerti, oratories, church music – was includes some of my favourite music ever (Dream of Gerontius would join Bach B minor on my desert island discs). Granted, no opera (and how good would that have been!) unlike Britten, but then there’s no Britten that makes me jump up and down with excitement at the thought of it (gasp!).

I’m thereafter a bit stumped. Because, if this really were a desert island situation, the rest would be a gamble. For example, I feel sure that over time I will develop a love, bordering on obsession, for the likes of Stravinksy, Shostakovitch, Prokofiev and Mahler. But right now, I just don’t know enough of their music. Similarly, composers like Whitacre and Dove, if they continue in the same vein, may become a ‘great’, someone who I would gladly listen to incessantly and obsessively, but only time will tell.

And whilst I adore the renaissance composers — Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis, Weelkes, Tomkins, Byrd — it is somewhat collectively. I couldn’t truly say I prefer one to the other, not just yet anyway.

In contradiction of that however, I feel that Tim’s top ten composers should represent at least one composers from outside the classical world, and from my other musical treasure – jazz. Gershwin would be a natural choice, for in the same short lifetime of writing innumerable hummable tunes, to become revered jazz standards, he also turned his hand to music of a more ‘serious’, concert hall nature and produced a triumphant Piano Concerto (my favourite musical form). And yet, it’s not him I’m going to choose. Whilst, my final choice is hardly in the same league as the others, he stands as my current favourite of this genre. So there.

And so. The final list is:

• 6. Elgar
• 7. Richard Strauss
• 8. Cole Porter
• 9. Debussy
• 10. Shostakovich

This’ll be interesting to revisit in a few years…

Categories: Music

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