# Favorites of yours that you found, didn't write all that much?



## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

I was wondering what composer really got you going only to discover that they either didn't write much, or there isn't anything really recorded from that composers works?


----------



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Schobert and Luython are two that I've been thinking about lately.


----------



## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

EJ Moeran.


----------



## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Hans Rott certainly belongs is this group.


----------



## Delicious Manager (Jul 16, 2008)

Some of mine:

Gustav Mahler
Carl Ruggles
Edgard Varèse
Jan Václav Voříšek


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Webern definitely


----------



## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

Mussorgsky(?)

don't know many..


----------



## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Alban Berg - take away his many songs and two operas and you're left with a meagre smattering of orchestral/chamber/piano works but at least they're all high on quality.


----------



## Tero (Jun 2, 2012)

Vivaldi

(just joking...the old joke of 500 concertos all the same)


----------



## Jaws (Jun 4, 2011)

Berg, he just didn't write much.


----------



## Taneyev (Jan 19, 2009)

Dukas
Magnard
Goldmark
Lekeu
Grofe


----------



## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

elgars ghost said:


> Alban Berg - take away his many songs and two operas and you're left with a meagre smattering of orchestral/chamber/piano works but at least they're all high on quality.


Why would you want to take away his songs and his operas?


----------



## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Henri Duparc is almost exclusively known for his collection of exquisite French songs which could all fit on a single disc.

Last year I picked up this disc... having misread it and thinking it was a collection of arias from the cantatas by J.S. Bach:










The disc, however, featured the delicious opera arias from J.C. Bach. I have not been able to find much else as far as J.C. Bach's operatic oeuvre. Indeed... the operatic oeuvre of most composers before before Mozart are often a challenge to find in quality recordings. Handel... and only recently Gluck, Vivaldi, Rameau, and Lully are the real exceptions. Hasse, Alessandro Scarlatti and many others are only just now being rediscovered.

More recently I would count Daniel Catan. I first came across his music in this Naxos recording:










I was immediately enthralled. Catan wed elements of late Romanticism... Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Puccini with rhythms and orchestration of Heitor Villa-Lobos and Latin-American music. I immediately picked up the only other top-notch professional recording of Catan's music, the Huston Opera's production of _Florencia en el Amazonas_.










This recording completely sold me on the composer and I awaited future recordings eagerly. Catan composed two subsequent operas, including _Il Postino_ which premiered at the Los Angeles Opera in September 2010. Unfortunately, the composer died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack the following year, at the age of 62.


----------



## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> Why would you want to take away his songs and his operas?


I don't mean take away as in disregard, but in my ideal world there would have been more from him in other categories.


----------



## An Die Freude (Apr 23, 2011)

Berg and Webern.


----------



## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

W.F. Bach is a favorite.


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Also, *Ligeti* hasn't written a huge quantity of works.


----------



## samurai (Apr 22, 2011)

I wish that Schumann and Brahms had written--or, in the latter's case--had allowed more of their symphonies to be published.


----------



## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

SLG-Why would you want to take away his songs and his operas?

elgars ghost-I don't mean take away as in disregard, but in my ideal world there would have been more from him in other categories.

I simply asked this because I find Berg's songs and operas are among my favorite works by him.


----------



## Hausmusik (May 13, 2012)

Arriaga
Berg
Dutilleux
Clara Schumann
Fanny Mendelssohn

And Schubert (wish there were much more)


----------



## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

I consider Wagner, R.Strauss and Bruckner in this category ... not enough orchestral and chamber works, though they had the talent to create them.
And I add some Russians, like Ippolitov Ivanov (not many works and hard to find) and Cui.


----------



## Turangalîla (Jan 29, 2012)

Mussorgsky! Everything he wrote was amazingly good, but he didn't write much at all! I want more from him! Life is not fair sometimes...


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Glenn Gould. If he manged to live well past 50 the amount of things he would have done as a composer/conductor and _not_ a pianist would have been brilliant! 

It's a shame he died early though. He was a brilliant pianist.


----------



## pollux (Nov 11, 2011)

Paul Dukas
Georges Bizet
Manuel de Falla

Thomas Linley the younger (1756–1778). One of the best post-Händel British composers, he was a contemporary and friend of Mozart, but he died even younger. His music is excellent and is available on Hyperion Records.

Nikolaus Bruhns (1665-1697). A German baroque composer, all his music fits in 3 CD, fortunately recorded for Ricercare.

John Danyel (1564 – c. 1626). A contemporary of Dowland, his songs and lute music reach similar heights. Available on Hyperion Records as well.


----------



## Meaghan (Jul 31, 2010)

When I heard _The Wreckers,_I was captivated and wanted to hear all of Ethel Smyth's operas, but learned to my great disappointment that none of her others had been recorded! She was not a terribly prolific composer, but she did write and publish a lot of music that I'll probably never get to hear. 

(I'm a broken record.)


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

The usual suspects (these being easily among my favourite 20th century composers) -

Durufle
Berg
Varese

Did a thread about this ages ago HERE.



samurai said:


> I wish that Schumann and Brahms had written--or, in the latter's case--had allowed more of their symphonies to be published.


In terms of Brahms, he was very scrupulous about what he allowed to be published. Eg. he composed many more violin sonatas than the three (I think?) he got published. In his final days/weeks alive, he was burning many scores which he didn't want found and published after his death. Maybe there was a "5th symphony" in that pile, who knows. No wonder most of what he left us, definitely in terms of his whole chamber output, they're all masterpieces bar none.


----------



## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Dutilleux

Oh yes! This is perhaps the living composer who I wish had composed a larger body of work more than any other.


----------



## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I consider Wagner, R.Strauss and Bruckner in this category ... not enough orchestral and chamber works, though they had the talent to create them.

Well obviously we all wish that our favorite composers had written more. I wish Bach had written a couple of operas. I wish Mozart had written just another 5 symphonies and just a couple more operas. How much more could Wagner or Strauss have written? They were both masters of orchestration... but they were also the greatest of musical dramatists. Opera was in their blood. There's no operatic composer comes near Wagner in the 19th century or Strauss in the 20th, IMO. Bruckner? You've got 11 symphonies, a couple large masses, and the motets. His entire oeuvre requires at least 12 CDs.


----------



## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> I wish Bach had written a couple of operas...


You can get a very good flavour of what a JS Bach opera might have sounded like with his large scale secular cantatas. Excellent examples include _Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan_, BWV 201 or _Hercules auf dem Scheidewege_, BWV 213, which show he was writing in Italian recitative and da capo aria styles prevalent then.

A lot of the times though, we don't necessarily need to wish they wrote more. We could instead wish nothing was ever lost in time. With Bach for example, the vast, vast bulk of his instrumental music can be presumed lost (he surely wrote more than just 3 violin concertos to have survived in their original form for example), and maybe 1/3 of his church cantatas are also gone. Hopefully, many remain hidden somewhere in dusty shelves waiting to be discovered!


----------



## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

Maybe that should be my next thread, composers who's stuff was lost...


----------

