Ten works you must know to feel music

1

The Red Book

Anonymous

(14th century)

The Red Book of Montserrat contains a unique collection of songs and dances for pilgrims from the 14th century that joins traditions of highbrow and popular music of the time. Some of its pieces are pleas encompassing the mysterious charm of ultraterrestrial yearning; the best piece, “Imperaytritz de la ciutat joiosa”, is a love chant within a fabled location, of magical miniature, where desire rejoices in the infiniteness of its demand. It is the pure joy of an eternal fountain.

 

2

Recercadas del Trattado de Glosas

Diego Ortiz

(1553)

The Recercadas are a prodigy of melancholic grace, of subtle harmony, of intelligence, but they are not like an oasis in a desert. Diego Ortiz, with Narváez, Mudarra, Lluís Milà and Cabezón, among others, illustrates the sky-high level of instrumental music of Spanish Renaissance. Still, in the Recercadas there is more than a quintessential epitome of a great tradition. There is tremor of a premonition subjected to order in an exquisite, wise and malleable fashion within the splendour of art in a humane measure.

 

3

Membra Jesu Nostri

Dietrich Buxtehude

(1680)

Danish Buxtehude is said to be Bach’s main predecessor. Proof of this are the cycle of seven brief cantatas, almost in oratorical form. Each cantata alludes to a pain of one member of the body of Christ in his Passion, and the whole set, of superb coherence, poignantly restrained and transparent is an exercise of meditation in pain transforming empathy into introspection, uncertainty into plea, in the hope of finally contemplating the beloved members beyond the shadows, face to face.

 

4

St Matthew Passion

Joahnn Sebastian Bach

(1727)

If, to many people, Bach stands at the very centre of music itself, The Passion is the summit of his art and, perhaps, the highest creative achievement of the human soul, from where the creature addresses its creator, at the top of its voice. Some of the highest unparalleled moments are the arias “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” and “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” which express the anguishing experience and the early lights of comfort that assuages like never before. Cioran said: “Bach is the only thing that makes you think that the universe is not a failure”. God can indeed be satisfied.

 

5

Concerts for harpsichords and string instruments

Johann Sebastian Bach

(1730)

The concerts for harpsichord and string instruments stand as the most gracious and suggestive instrumental compositions of the composer. Bach is tireless and relentless in his search for embellishments that make his dialogue with the instruments more expressive. He never ceases to amaze us with surprises like the adagio from the concert for harpsichord, flute and strings, specially the one in the old and beautiful version of Rampal, as it evokes a lunar landscape from a dream-like and secret fable, or the marvellous adagio for two harpsichords and strings in C minor, of weightless delicacy.

 

6

Concert for piano # 1. Op. 12

Ludwig van Beethoven

(1795-1801)

Beethoven’s music did not receive immediate public recognition. The echoes of that achievement still strike us on listening to the opening movement of the first piano concerto, with that string of themes linked with an audacity as yet unknown, only the precursors of one of the longest most poignant fragments in the history of music. The profound connection between piano and orchestra expands Mozart’s art and ends up commanding his century. The hypersensitive piano player and unparalleled architect of sounds still blind us. Always arrogant and free, the romantic play prevails in the universe.

 

7

Nocturni

Fryderyck Chopin

(1830-1849)

Romantic sensitiveness is nocturnal. Searches for seclusiveness, shade and secret to find its pulse while listening in the background to the endless bass of the world enigma. But it can also be gentle like a whispered dance in Chopin’s second and third nocturni or Schumann’s Träumerei: sleepy, slight, brief, they transit for a while on land and then vanish. In many other nocturni (the poignant seventh, or thirteenth), serenity and storminess put up a fight in the artist’s soul, like in Hölderlin and Keats’ poems.

 

8

Third Symphony

Gustav Mahler

(1893-1896)

Mahler is an unfathomable composer. He brought forward all the culminating moments announced by Brahms and Bruckner, and he himself foreshadowed his break from Schönberg and Berg. Perhaps it is his third symphony the one that is most unfathomable and rich of his work. A disproportionate, Nietzschean chant to nature, mystery and hope; a hieroglyph; a collection of ancient discoveries and new experiments. George Steiner wrote about him that the chant in the night from the Third Symphony transports us to a home where we have never been, and is now ours.

 

9

Gymnopédies; Gnossiennes

Erik Satie

(1888 and 1890)

The strange magnetism emanating from this collection of brief pieces, their cocooning evocative force, have been overused as soundtracks even advertising. And yet, they maintain their mysterious halo. With the most secretive works of Debussy and Ravel, they sing the song of the swan of neoromanticism at the dusk of the fin de siècle. The communicating vessels of mystery are the playing field of genius. The smell of Satie’s third Gnossiene is captivating; the light of the fifth celebrates the horizon with Giorgione’s shadows.

 

10

String quartets

Dimitri Xostakóvitz

(1938-1974)

This Russian composer started composing string quarters relatively late, in 1938, on the prelude to the big Stalinian purges. The quartets were a discrete refuge from where to continue his musical experiments. He never abandoned this form, of condensed tension. He tried ideas and entire movements which he later incorporated to his “major” pieces, a dense, lucid and incandescent musical world. These pieces allow us to approach the exuberant art of the mistreated Russian genius, in its intimacy, as it allowed to achieve the sought-after and cherished freedom.