What surprised me was, that there were so few blog's that tackled classical music finds on Spotify.
Since I was pounded with Spotify gift cards for my birthday (knowing nothing else to put on the wishlist...) I started to explore the hu-mung-us amount of classical music content on the stream service. What I also found were shady companies that used smartly tagged third rate performances to generate some income, but polluted the search function on Spotify severely. So, started to make my own playlists and expected to find blogs that had already made some more for me. Uh... nope. There were two other blogs; http://www.spotifyclassical.com/ great initiative, but a bit of "throw it over the fence" approach with 72 hs lasting playlists (and for some reason stopped making new ones) and http://classicalmusiconspotify.tumblr.com who I found via the Gramophone magazine forum. Latter is a nice blog, but still no "real" program of collected pieces. Now you should know I'm a bit of a classical music elitist prick, so have my own rules for playlists... I really dislike short pieces stashed together, as you hear it on Dutch radio 4 or even BBC 3 these days. So, if possible, it's complete works, plus curiosity and interesting performances take the lead here... :-) Enough talk, music now...! Here is my first playlist, for all you earlybirds out there, of sunshine music.
The young Dutch Matangi string quartet kick off with a radiant B-flat quartet by Joseph Haydn, op 76 no 4, then an overture by a contemporary of van Beethoven named Andreas Jacob Romberg (1767-1821) played by the Hofer Symphoniker (no, never heard of them before, but Germany has about a hundred of these fine but unknown orchestras) conducted by Luca Bizozerro, followed by a frenetic c minor Quartetsatz from Franz Schubert by the Belcea quartet and finally the second serenade in A flat major, conducted by Bernard Haitink and played by the London Symphony Orchestra. Weird about that CD (can you still call a playlist on Spotify a CD? Well, nevermind:-) is that Brahms third symphony which it is paired with is played lackluster and rather boring, while the second serenade sparkles and is one of the best performances I know...
So, enjoy the music and good morning to you all!
(one hour and eight minutes of music...)
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